Robert Silverberg: Trending quotes

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

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

Source: Dying Inside

World , Color , Time

“The universe is a perilous place. We do our best. Everything else is unimportant.”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 12, section 4 (p. 179)

Universe

“I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?”

Robert Silverberg

Section 4
Short fiction, Nightwings (1968)

World

“They were apt to be disappointed with the way he fulfilled his promises to them, for he intended, if he could, to sweep both the bickering rivals from power. But he did not ask pure and total saintliness of himself in his dealings with those whose chief role in the government appeared to be to impede and obstruct.”

Robert Silverberg book Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 4 “The Book of the Labyrinth”, Chapter 7 (p. 383)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

Disappointment , Way , Appearance

“It’s not a philosophy, Mr. Nichols. It’s an accommodation to the nature of reality.”

Robert Silverberg book The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 16 (p. 98)

Nature , Reality

“Anything big and strange always upsets the people in power.”

Robert Silverberg

Source: Short fiction, Thomas the Proclaimer (1972), Chapter 6, “The Woman Who Is Sore at Heart Reproaches Thomas” (p. 91)

People

“You may not hold me guilty of sins committed in dreams.”

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 8 (p. 25)

Dreams

“I have lost my sense of a universe. 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.”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 1, section 2 (pp. 13-14)

World , Thinking , Sense , Universe

“I hate no one, sir. It seems a waste of emotional energy.”

Robert Silverberg

Source: Short fiction, The Emperor and the Maula (2007), p. 463

Hate

““Come,” Deliamber said. “There is a vast journey ahead of us.”
“I know. That’s why I don’t want to get up.””

Robert Silverberg book Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 3 “The Book of the Isle of Sleep”, Chapter 2 (p. 231)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“Knowledge never injures the soul. It only purges that which encrusts and saps the soul.”

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 31 (p. 110)

Soul , Knowledge

“He never had really been able to understand what it was that she wanted him for…although he felt certain that she wanted him for something real, that he filled some need for her, as she did for him, which could for lack of a more specific term be called love.”

Robert Silverberg

Source: Short fiction, Against Babylon (1986), p. 276

Love , Understanding

“Love of others begins with love of self.”

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 35 (p. 126)

Love

“Gottfried, like any true dictator, liked to surround himself with bland obliging ciphers.”

Robert Silverberg book The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 7 (p. 27)

“They could pray, they had the illusion that a divine plan governed this best of all possible worlds, while I was left in bleak, stormy limbo, dismally aware that the universe makes no sense and that the only universal truth there is is that Entropy Eventually Wins.”

Robert Silverberg

Source: Short fiction, Thomas the Proclaimer (1972), Chapter 3, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (p. 76)

Truth , World , Sense , Universe

“When you poison a man in order to sell him the antidote, you don’t boast about it afterward to the victim!”

Robert Silverberg

In Star Science Fiction 5, edited by Frederik Pohl, p. 53
Short fiction, Company Store (1959)

“You can make no meaningful evaluations of the universe without the confidence that you are seeing it clearly.”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 6, section 8 (p. 89)

Confidence , Universe

““You speak very generally,” Valentine said.
“I am an oracle, and oracles are never terribly specific,” she replied lightly.”

Robert Silverberg book Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 1, Chapter 12 (p. 93)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

““I know it stinks. The whole universe stinks, sometimes. Haven’t you discovered that yet?”
“It doesn’t have to stink!” Rawlins said sharply, his voice rising. “Is that the lesson you’ve learned in all those years? The universe doesn’t stink. Man stinks! And he does it by voluntary choice because he’d rather stink than smell sweet! We don’t have to lie. We don’t have to cheat. We could opt for honor and decency and—” Rawlins stopped abruptly. In a different tone he said, “I sound young as hell to you, don’t I, Charles?”
“You’re entitled to make mistakes,” Boardman said. “That’s what being young is for.”
“You genuinely believe and know that there’s a cosmic malevolence in the workings of the universe?”
Boardman touched the tips of his thick, short fingers together. “I wouldn’t put it that way. There’s no personal power of darkness running things, any more than there’s a personal power of good. The universe is a big impersonal machine. As it functions it tends to put stress on some of its minor parts, and those parts wear out, and the universe doesn’t give a damn about that, because it can generate replacements. There’s nothing immoral about wearing out parts, but you have to admit that from the point of view of the part under stress it’s a stinking deal.””

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 4, section 3 (p. 72)

Lie , Way , Hell , Learning