Quotes from Robert Silverberg

Living, we fret. Dying, we live. I'll keep that in mind. I'll be of good cheer.

As youngest boy in service, the worst jobs fell to him, and this would

any sinner can find redemption if the yield of his sin is spectacular enough. Our

Part of the prejudice thing is that the victim has to be somebody weaker than you in numbers, but somebody you secretly admire or fear.

It was the same in just about every trade. Sooner or later someone decided it needed organizing, and the one thing you could be sure of was that the organizers weren't going to be the people who, by general acknowledgment, were at the top of their craft. They were working too hard. To be fair, it generally wasn't done by the worst, neither. They were working hard, too. They had to.

If I am just as stupid when I am twenty as I was when I was two, if I am just as stupid when I am a hundred as I was when I was fifty, then I am not doing my job. I am occupying space and time to no purpose, and I might just as well have been a lump of rock.

Where's the room for free will in this mechanical universe of yours, Charles?" "There isn't any. That's why I say the universe stinks." "We have no freedom at all?" "The freedom to wriggle a little on the hook.

It was as though our invaders had passed the word through the galaxies: SEE OLD EARTH NOW UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.

I don't think I can even imagine what a culture that's been developing steadily for a billion years ought to be like. Disembodied electrical essences, maybe. Ghostly creatures flitting in and out of the eighth, ninth, and tenth dimensions. Cosmic minds that know all, perceive all, understand all. Maybe

When you enslave a black man, you enslave yourself as well, for now you are bound to him as surely as he is bound to you, and your character is shaped by his bondage as surely as his own is. Make the black man servile, and in the same process you make yourself tyrannical. Make the black man quiver in fear before you, and you make yourself a monster of terror.

Know this, and know it well: time is never wasted. Wherever we go, whatever we do, everything is an aspect of education. Even when we don't immediately grasp the lesson.

I don't understand why anybody old enough to know the score ever gets married, anyway. Why should love require a contract? Why put yourself into the clutches of the state and give it power over you? Why invite lawyers to fuck around with your assets? Marriage is for the immature and the insecure and the ignorant. We who see through such institutions should be content to live together without legal coercion

He was looking for a vehicle of purpose, for a vessel to contain his formless ambitions and abilities.

He] had riposted with the proper metaphysical statements, yet he was disturbed.

There are other themes for poetry besides immersion in the Will, my friends. The love of person for person, the joy of defending one's home, the wonder of standing naked beneath the fiery stars—" The invader laughed. "Can it be that Earth fell so swiftly because its only poets were poets of acquiescence to destiny?

THE EAGLE HAS LANDED by Robert J. Sawyer I've spent a lot of time watching Earth—more than forty of that planet's years. My arrival was in response to the signal from our automated probe, which had detected that the paper-skinned bipedal beings of that world had split the atom. The probe had served well, but there were some things only a living being could do properly, and assessing whether a lifeform should be contacted by the Planetary Commonwealth was one.

On the contrary, Mr. Wiggin. The tax laws are designed to trick people into paying more than they have to. That way the rich who are in the know get to take advantage of drastic tax breaks, while those who don't have such good connections and haven't yet found an accountant who does are tricked into paying ludicrously higher amounts. I, however, know all the tricks.

Death was the only question that contained its own answer, and when you asked the question and had the answer you were gone, you were nothing.

To enter the past is like poking a baseball bat into a spiderweb: it can't be done subtly or delicately.

That is the truth. I know now that we need not fear death, if we have done our tasks. And when we cease to fear death, there is no death. That is the truest truth I know: There is no death.

Ya no me inquieté más por pasar la montaña, pues sabía que lo haría, y del otro lado mi padre y yo cazaríamos juntos el ave punzón en las Tierras Bajas Abrasadas, saliendo juntos, protegiéndonos mutuamente del peligro, colaborando en el rastreo y en el ataque final, conociendo una intimidad que nunca había existido entre nosotros durante mi niñez.

That is no country for old men, he thought.

Since the Bible text we have could not be any older than about 1300 B.C., this Sumerian myth must have been in circulation in the Mesopotamian region for at least a thousand years when the earliest text of Genesis was written.

Was that a sly smile of the initiate, or a dumb smile of bluffing?