Quotes from Robert Silverberg

It's because I hate to think that anything goes to waste. I mean, that anything that was ever important or valuable or precious to somebody is just buried and forgotten about. I want to salvage all those things and let them be important to somebody again … so they won't feel neglected.

Not even hatred can corrode real honor.

They say this is the richest era of human existence; but I think a man can be richer in knowing every atom of a single golden island in a blue sea than by spending his days striding among all the worlds.

For Harlan, to remind him of open windows, the currents of the Delaware River, quarters with two heads, and other pitfalls.

It is a good thing, The Man in the Maze will suggest, that we are insulated from each other: we are wounded by living, by mere existence, and we could not stand the stink of each other's souls.

We are fighting that force in the universe that nudges everything toward chaos. I mean that we are at war with time; we are enemies of entropy; we seek to snatch back those things that have been taken from us by the years—the childhood toys, the friends and relatives who are gone, the events of the past—everything, we struggle to recapture everything, back to the beginning of creation, out of this need not to let anything slip away.

The only place where he revealed the other Oliver, the machine-Oliver, was when it came to drugs. Second week on campus I scored some groovy Moroccan hash and he absolutely wouldn't. Told me that he'd spend 17½ years calibrating his head properly and he wasn't about to let it get messed up now.

Everything I know is what I have been taught by the sayings and writings of people who have studied the sayings and writings of people who have—and so on.

We make only a small blaze, and then we go out; but in his springtime and his summer he had burned brightly enough, and he did not feel he had earned this sullen, joyless autumn.

naturally they hate each other to a high-frequency zing.

You see the difficulty of believing in a divine force that determines all events? Where is the element of choice that makes suffering meaningful? To force you into a sin, and then to require you to endure defeat as atonement, seems to me an empty exercise.

Living, we fret. Dying, we live.

It was an irony that Rudiger, the anarchist, the man who believed in individualism and the abolition of all political institutions, should be so good at leading a team of fishermen. Rudiger didn't care for teamwork in the abstract.

Zalzan Kavol drew forth his money-pouch. Instantly the attention of the Hjorts sharpened. This was indeed the right tactic, Valentine decided. "Perhaps I have found the necessary document," said Zalzan Kavol.

It isn't a philosophy at all," Jack Bernstein maintained, hammering fist against palm. "It's just a gang of strong-arm men who happened to find a power vacuum and moved right in. They've got no overriding program of government. They simply do what they think is necessary to perpetuate their own rule and keep things from blowing up again. They grabbed power, and now they improvise from day to day.

This business of humanity having two different sexes makes for all kinds of headaches.

Sometimes one does not learn the value of things until they are lost.

The main thing about aliens is that they are alien. They feel no responsibility for fulfilling any of your expectations. (Dark City Lights)

Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting.

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.

It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.

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

When you know that something is dying inside you, you learn not to put much trust in the random vitalities of the fleeting moment.

That is to say, things have a way of getting worse and worse all the time, until in the end they get so bad that we lack even the means of knowing how bad they really are.