Robert Silverberg > Quotes

“Utopias are boring. Distopias on the other hand, are interesting.”
― Robert Silverberg

“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.”
― Robert Silverberg

“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.”
― Robert Silverberg, Dying Inside

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

“Living, we fret. Dying, we live. I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll be of good cheer.”
― Robert Silverberg

“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.”
― Robert Silverberg

“My temperament is not inclined toward more self-promotion than is absolutely necessary for my professional well-being.”
― Robert Silverberg

“Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.”
― Robert Silverberg, Nightwings

“Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that’s in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.”
― Robert Silverberg, Lord Valentine's Castle

“I'm an urban New Yorker to the last molecule.”
― Robert Silverberg, Dying Inside

“Meanwhile here I am- Earthborn woman, a mere barbaric maula, geting deeper into Imperial Space with each passing light second. I should be trembling with fear, I suppouse.
No. Let the Emperor tremble. Laylah is here!”
― Robert Silverberg

“Because people fight most fiercely when they dare not admit even to themselves that their cause is unjust.”
― Robert Silverberg, Legends II

“There are true unseen forces, but not nearly so many as we believe, nor would they rule us so sternly if we did not admit them to our souls. We would not be assailed half so often by devils, had we not taken the trouble to invent so many of them.”
― Robert Silverberg, Lord of Darkness

“He felt disgruntled and obscurely let down at having paid good money to discover that the vision that had so irradiated his consciousness was a second-hand one. On the other hand, he told himself, probably it was better to hear that a phantom memory had come floating up out of some lecture of his student days than to be informed that he was going out of his mind.”
― Robert Silverberg

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

“In every man's life there is something he feels driven to do, something that pricks him at the core of his soul so long as it remains undone, and yet as he approaches the doing of it he will know fear, for perhaps to fulfill the obsession will bring him more pain than pleasure.”
― Robert Silverberg, A Time of Changes

“She was strikingly ignorant, but he had known that from the start. What he had not known was how quickly her ignorance would cease to seem charming and would begin to seem contemptible.”
― Robert Silverberg, Thorns

“The physical distress was over, but something else still remained, some sort of free-floating disquiet, at first hard to comprehend, but which he came quickly to understand for what it was: the splendor of the tunnels had kindled in him at first a sense of admiration verging on awe, but that had gone moving swiftly onward through his soul to become a crushing, devastating sensation of personal inadequacy.”
― Robert Silverberg

“History could be as arbitrary as poetry, he told himself: what is history, other than a matter of choice, the picking and choosing of certain facts out of a multitude to elicit a meaningful pattern, which was not necessarily the true one? The act of selecting facts, by definition, inherently involved discarding facts as well, often the ones most inconvenient to the pattern that the historian was trying to reveal. Truth thus became an abstract concept: three different historians, working with the same set of data, might easily come up with three different "truths." Whereas myth digs deep into the fundamental reality of the spirit, into that infinite well that is the shared consciousness of the entire race, reaching the levels where truth is not an optional matter, but the inescapable foundation of all else. In that sense myth could be truer than history.”
― Robert Silverberg

“He met me at the airport; it was ten in the morning, Washington time, when I arrived, after having taken a plane that left Los Angeles International at 10:10 A.M. Los Angeles time. Who says time-reversal is hard to accomplish?”
― Robert Silverberg, The Masks of Time

“Basil Donovan was drunk again.”
― Robert Silverberg, The Seventh Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®: 25 Modern and Classic Stories

“There are our ghosts,' Smithers said.

It was a word he liked to use, said Brewster. Like most of us Brewster had read a few ghost stories, and to him the word 'ghosts' summoned up the creaking floorboards of a haunted house, shrouded white figures gliding silently through darkness, fluttering robes moving of their own bodiless accord, strangely transparent coaches travelling swiftly down a midnight road, and other such images quite remote from the chanting and drumming of desert folk in gaudy garb, with jingling anklets and necklaces, under a hot fierce sun. But the sounds of the Thar came from some invisible source, and to Smithers they were sounds made by ghosts.

("Smithers And The Ghosts Of The Thar")”
― Robert Silverberg

“In dealing with people who are enormously touchy on matters of honor and pride, I think it’s wisest to be accommodating to their needs, especially if they’re eight feet tall and provide you with your wages.”
― Robert Silverberg, Lord Valentine's Castle

“He was only now outgrowing his playboy phase, groping his way out of frivolity the way others might grope their way out of atheism.”
― Robert Silverberg, Tower of Glass

“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.”
― Robert Silverberg, Legends II

“Earth fell,” said the Surgeon, “because the Will required us to atone for the sin our ancestors committed when they treated your ancestors like beasts. The quality of our poetry had nothing to do with it.”
― Robert Silverberg, Nightwings

“I want to live to get back to my own time. I still hang on to the faint chance that the rainbow will come back for me and take me down the line to tell my tale in what I have already started to think of as the future. I want to make my report. The news I’d like to bring you people up there in the world of the future is that these Ice Age folk don’t see themselves as primitive. They know, they absolutely know, that they’re the crown of creation. They have a language—two of them, in fact—they have history, they have music, they have poetry, they have technology, they have art, they have architecture. They have religion. They have laws. They have a way of life that has worked for thousands of years, that will go on working for thousands more. You may think it’s all grunts and war-clubs back here, but you’re wrong. I can make this world real to you, if I could only get back there to you.”
― Robert Silverberg, House of Bones

“Gods are not granted the power of choice; it is the price and the wonder of their godhead.”
― Robert Silverberg, The Stochastic Man

“You’re not too tall,” Dunk blurted out. “You’re just right for …” He realized what he had been about to say, and blushed furiously. “For?” said Tanselle, cocking her head inquisitively. “Puppets,” he finished lamely.”
― Robert Silverberg, Legends: Stories By The Masters of Modern Fantasy

“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.”
― Robert Silverberg, Across a Billion Years