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Robert Sheckley Quotes
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Robert Sheckley was an American writer. First published in the science-fiction magazines of the 1950s, his numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist, and broadly comical.

Nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards, Sheckley was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001. Wikipedia  

✵ 16. July 1928 – 9. December 2005
Robert Sheckley photo
Robert Sheckley: 114   quotes 2   likes

Robert Sheckley Quotes

“My dear Dahl, the first, the primary, task is to bring the earth back into ecological balance. That’s your task, you and the Bahamas Corporation. Ours is to give people something exciting to do other than war while that is going on. Without us and our Hunt, you and your high-minded scientists will just be another group of dreamers living in an imaginary kingdom of sweet reason while the madness of real politics rages all around you. Be practical, Dahl, let’s do something together.”

Robert Sheckley book Hunter/Victim

“There is something in what you say,” Dahl admitted. “I’ve been aware for some time of the shortcomings inherent in the sane, dispassionate thinking that we scientists advocate. People don’t pay any attention. Unless there’s an emergency like Love Canal or Chernobyl, the idea of maintaining and upgrading the earth and its ecosystems is not exactly box-office.”
Source: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 65 (p. 259)

War , Madness , People , Rage

“We of the Hunt are part of the solution. We offer voluntary murder as a substitute for war. You know that mankind will never be satisfied unless it is killing something. People can’t even properly enjoy a landscape unless there’s something moving across it that can be shot at.”

Robert Sheckley book Hunter/Victim

Source: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 65 (p. 258)

War , People , Parting

“Dickerson watched the telephone like a man looking at a sleeping cobra. It could spring into virulent life at any moment, bite him with its hollow fangs, flood his system with the intellectual equivalent of poison, force him to leave the tried-and-true path of safe routine and jump into the dangerous and unpredictable unknown.”

Robert Sheckley book Hunter/Victim

Source: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 60 (p. 247)

Sleep , Life , Spring

“I beg of you to take this warning seriously, even though these people may be crazies. Since the invention of gunpowder, crazies have been bad news.”

Robert Sheckley book Hunter/Victim

Source: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 40 (p. 185)

Bad luck , People

“There was a moist, fertile, decaying sort of odor in the air. Florida was the sort of place that always seemed to be threatening to slip out of time and go back to the Paleozoic where it belonged. The light was a tawny gold filtered through a fragmented wall of green.”

Robert Sheckley book Hunter/Victim

Source: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 38 (p. 175)

Light , Time

“Outside the curtained windows, Paris stewed in its miasma of self-congratulation and diesel fumes.”

Robert Sheckley book Hunter/Victim

Source: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 1 (p. 11)

Self-confidence

“It was an eccentric sort of event, even for Esmeralda, and needed a special kind of person to volunteer to do it. Luckily, the human race has never thought up anything so ludicrous, dangerous, and frivolous that it won’t attract many willing volunteers.”

Robert Sheckley book Victim Prime

Source: Victim Prime (1987), Chapter 56 (p. 207)

Personality

“I’ve never been able to understand that custom.”

Robert Sheckley book Victim Prime

“Not all customs have to have a reason.”

Chapter 20 (p. 88)
Victim Prime (1987)

Understanding

“Sarah Daubray was opposed to the entire Huntsworld philosophy. She had said on several occasion that only they poor should kill each other, since the wealthy were too valuable to sacrifice. Louvaine, however, was a liberal; he believed anyone had the right to kill anyone else, rich or poor.”

Robert Sheckley book Victim Prime

Source: Victim Prime (1987), Chapter 20 (p. 86)

“After many centuries we have rediscovered nature’s way of keeping populations in hand. Nature does it the old-fashioned way, by killing people.”

Robert Sheckley book Victim Prime

Prologue (p. 8)
Victim Prime (1987)

Way , Fashion , People , Nature

“It takes a particular kind of a man to endure the shattering immensities of space and the paranoid-inducing stresses of threats from the unknown. It takes a man with a large and impervious ego and a consistently high degree of aggressive self-confidence. It takes a kind of a nut.”

Robert Sheckley book Welcome to the Standard Nightmare

Welcome to the Standard Nightmare (p. 88)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Self-confidence , Confidence

“Love, the secret and unofficial heart of pair-bonding behavior, is a force to be reckoned with but never predicted. Love supersedes all other directives and cancels previous obligations. The shared look of love is love’s preview, presenting a foretaste of the joys and sorrows to come, and setting into motion the automatic mating machinery upon which the success and stability of the State depends.”

Robert Sheckley

Sneak Previews (p. 85)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Dependency , Success , Heart , Joy

“Kettelman bristled. Nothing got him angrier than when people implied he was paranoid. It made him feel persecuted.”

Robert Sheckley

A Supplicant in Space (p. 60)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Feeling , People

“From one viewpoint there were (potentially) a multiplicity of Gleisters; but from another viewpoint there was only one, and he was that one. After all, it didn’t matter what these other people called themselves or where they came from; he was only the person he was here and now, the person whom he experienced. Reality is positional, ego is relational, and nature doesn’t deal in abstractions.”

Robert Sheckley

Slaves of Time (p. 19)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Personality , People , Nature , Reality

“Not only can you not step into the same river twice; it is not even the same you who can’t step into the same river twice. Everything modifies everything. There is no niche in the past waiting for him to come back and occupy it. Nature will tolerate a paradox, but she abhors a vacuum.”

Robert Sheckley

Slaves of Time (p. 18)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Past , Waiting , Nature

“Linguistic accommodation as well. Are they speaking my language or am I speaking theirs? I can never know: the transaction cannot watch itself being transacted.”

Robert Sheckley

Slaves of Time (p. 16)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

“It is all so familiar! I suppose that an electron, traveling from one atom to another, also expects to enter a realm of unimaginable novelty. But perhaps the scenery in every part of the universe is roughly similar; since one sees in accordance with who one is rather than with what is there.”

Robert Sheckley

Slaves of Time (p. 16)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Universe , Travel , Parting

“Nothing happens for the first time, especially if what you’re trying to do is to invent something absolutely novel and unprecedented. Of course, if nothing happens for the first time, that leaves the apparent problem of how anything happens at all. But the difficulty is entirely semantic: in the eternal recurrence of subatomic configurations of which our world is a simulacrum, there is no question of beginnings or endings. There are only middles, continuations, repetitions. Originality is a concept possible only to a limited viewpoint.”

Robert Sheckley

Slaves of Time (pp. 14-15)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

World , Problem , Time , Question

“Charlie Gleister had invented a time machine, but he hadn’t invented it right because it didn’t work.”

Robert Sheckley

Slaves of Time (p. 11)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Time

“I found her charming, went home and thought no more about her. Or, I thought I would think no more about her. But in the following days and nights her image remained obsessively before my eyes. My appetite fell off and I began sleeping badly. My computer checked out the relevant data and told me that I might conceivably be having a nervous breakdown; but the strongest inference was that I was in love.”

Robert Sheckley book The Robot Who Looked Like Me

The Robot Who Looked Like Me (p. 3)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Home , Sleep , Night , Thinking

“It was one hell of an inspection when you went around finding how many sane men you had left.”

Robert Sheckley

Fool’s Mate (p. 87)
Short fiction, Shards of Space (1962)

Hell , Men

“Hope could be dangerous, desire could be catastrophic.”

Robert Sheckley

The Girls and Nugent Miller (p. 24)
Short fiction, Shards of Space (1962)

Hope

“Had he been right or was he just another visionary?”

Robert Sheckley book Watchbird

Watchbird (p. 44)
Short fiction, Notions: Unlimited (1960)

“You simply can’t throw strangers together at random and expect the fiery, quick romance to turn into love. Love has its own rules and enforces them rigidly.”

Robert Sheckley

Gray Flannel Armor (p. 9)
Short fiction, Notions: Unlimited (1960)

Love , Making love

“Ifs and buts could erode the soundest of principles.”

Robert Sheckley

Hands Off (p. 86)
Short fiction, Citizen in Space (1955)

“What kind of intelligent beings would evolve on a planet that is all mountains?”

Robert Sheckley

“Stupid ones!” Casker said.
Untouched by Human Hands (p. 75)
Short fiction, Untouched by Human Hands (1954)

Mountain , Intelligence

“This planet’s secret menace was—freedom!”

Robert Sheckley book Shape

Shape (p. 44)
Short fiction, Untouched by Human Hands (1954)

Secret , Freedom

“Isn’t there anything you can do about the predator?”

Robert Sheckley book Dimension of Miracles

Carmody asked.
“Nothing. Nor would I if I could. Predation is a necessary circumstance. Even the Gods are eventually eaten by Fate. You will not be an exception to the universal rule.”

Chapter 21 (p. 136)
Dimension of Miracles (1968)

“It might have meant something, or it might not have. That was the thing about uncertainty, you were never sure.”

Robert Sheckley book Hunter/Victim

Source: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 18 (p. 100)

“It was the sort of atmosphere of good humor which so often accompanies a total absence of good taste.”

Robert Sheckley book Victim Prime

Source: Victim Prime (1987), Chapter 48 (pp. 187-188)

“I’m proposing to pay you five thousand dollars to do something you’ll find quite enjoyable.”

Robert Sheckley book Victim Prime

“Make it ten,” Foote said, “and I’ll enjoy it even more.”

Chapter 37 (pp. 151-152)
Victim Prime (1987)

“Nobody says any longer, When will the killing stop?”

Robert Sheckley book Victim Prime

Now we know that the killing will stop only when life itself stops.

Prologue (p. 8)
Victim Prime (1987)

“Love is always a risk; but hate is a deadly peril.”

Robert Sheckley

I See a Man Sitting on a Chair, and the Chair Is Biting His Leg (p. 150)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Love , Hate , Making love

“The disease may not be too difficult to live with. I thought you said it was terminal?”

Robert Sheckley

“So I did. But then, everything is terminal, even health, even life itself. The only question is how long, and in what manner.”

I See a Man Sitting on a Chair, and the Chair Is Biting His Leg (p. 142)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Disease

“I know they can’t help being young, but isn’t there something they can do about being so stupid?”

Robert Sheckley

“I reckon not, Mr. Washburn,” Curly says.

The Never-Ending Western Movie (p. 119)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Help , Stupidity

“What is the purpose of being really intelligent if not to have the substance of what you want without mistaking it for the shadow?”

Robert Sheckley book Welcome to the Standard Nightmare

Welcome to the Standard Nightmare (p. 102)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

Intelligence

“You argue too damned well!”

Robert Sheckley

“It is just my good luck,” Detringer said, “that logic happens to be on the side of helping me.”

A Supplicant in Space (p. 64)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

“Paradox is the inevitable forerunner of chaos.”

Robert Sheckley

The Impacted Man (p. 49)
Short fiction, Untouched by Human Hands (1954)

“Not even the thought of death can upset the man who is going into space for the first time. The journey into the unknown transcends the framework of anxiety, at least for a while.”

Robert Sheckley book The Alchemical Marriage of Alistair Crompton

Source: Crompton Divided (1978), Chapter 6 (p. 28)

Death , Time

“We denizens of Earth have a common vice: We take what we’re offered, whether we need it or not.
You can get into a lot of trouble that way.”

Robert Sheckley book Pilgrimage to Earth

Protection (p. 101)
Short fiction, Pilgrimage to Earth (1957)

Way

“Time devours our feeble mortality, leaving us with but the sour residue of memory.”

Robert Sheckley book Mindswap

Marvin nodded. “Yet this ineffable and ungraspable quantity,” he replied, “this time which no man may possess, is in truth our only possession.”
Source: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 24 (p. 110)

Time , Memory

“Words, in the final analysis, are just about as futile as actions, and much less fun.”

Robert Sheckley book The Alchemical Marriage of Alistair Crompton

Source: Crompton Divided (1978), Chapter 8 (p. 39)

“I’ve heard that some of the larger spiders hunt songbirds. I have no objection to that. The spiders belong here, too. Let nature do what it needs to do. We who are people know more than to guide ourselves by nature’s practices.”

Robert Sheckley

The Tales of Zanthias (published in Weird Tales (July-August, 2003); reprinted in David G. Hartwell (ed.), Year’s Best Fantasy 4 (pp. 400-401))
Short fiction

People , Nature