Robert Silverberg: Trending quotes (page 4)

“Deliamber shrugged. “Such things are never fairly distributed. What makes you think that only the guilty are punished?”
“The Divine—”
“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 book Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 5 “The Book of the Castle”, Chapter 4 (pp. 424-425)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

Thinking , Universe

“Moas aren’t very bright,” Gracchus answers. “That’s one good reason why they became extinct.”

Robert Silverberg

Short fiction, Born with the Dead (1974)

“He did not consider the possibility of his own death. At his age, death was still something that happened to other people.”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 1, section 3 (p. 17)

Death , People , Age

“This time of year, the whole crazy city could go in one big fire storm. There were times that he almost wished that it would. He hated this smoggy, tawdry Babylon of a city, its endless tangle of freeways, the strange-looking houses, the filthy air, the thick, choking, glossy foliage everywhere, the drugs, the booze, the divorces, the laziness, the sleaziness, the porno shops and the naked encounter parlors and the massage joints, the weird people wearing their weird clothes and driving their weird cars and cutting their hair in weird ways. There was a cheapness, a trashiness, about everything here, he thought. Even the mansions and the fancy restaurants were that way: hollow, like slick movie sets. He sometimes felt that the trashiness bothered him more than the out-and-out evil. If you kept sight of your own values you could do battle with evil, but trashiness slipped up around you and infiltrated your soul without your even knowing it. He hoped that his sojourn in Los Angeles was not doing that to him.”

Robert Silverberg

Source: Short fiction, Against Babylon (1986), p. 264

Hate , People , Hope , Angels

“The denizens of Citizens Service Houses are not, as a rule, gifted with a lot of common sense, but they often make up for that by being extremely argumentative and vindictive.”

Robert Silverberg

Source: Short fiction, Hot Times in Magma City (1995), p. 56

Sense , Housing

“To devote oneself to vigilance when the enemy is an imaginary one is idle, and to congratulate oneself for looking long and well for a foe that is not coming is foolish and sinful. My life has been a waste.”

Robert Silverberg

Section 5
Short fiction, Nightwings (1968)

Life

“I think power is a sickness and governing is a folly for madmen.”

Robert Silverberg book Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 1, Chapter 15 (p. 113)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

Thinking

“But in this logging camp in the mountains I came to understand that kings are nothing but men set high. The gods do not anoint them, but rather the will of men, and men can strip them of their lofty rank.”

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 17 (p. 62)

Men , God , Mountain , Understanding

“Not all lawyers are annoying. Some are dead.”

Robert Silverberg

Source: Short fiction, The Emperor and the Maula (2007), p. 476

Dead

“What value is lineage to a drowning man?”

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 40 (p. 142)

“It is peaceful here. I am far from the fishmongers and the drainers and the wine-peddlers and all those others whose songs of commerce clang in the streets of cities. A man can think; a man can look within his soul, and find those things that have been the shaping of him, and draw them forth, and examine them, and come to know himself.”

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 7 (p. 21)

Peace , Soul , Thinking , Wine

“Stale is stale and borrowed is borrowed, no matter how original your models may have been.”

Robert Silverberg

Introduction to New Dimensions 1, edited by Robert Silverberg

“I think we made love three times that final summer. Made love! Preposterous euphemism for fucking, almost as bad as the most grotesque of all, slept together. Whatever Sundara and I made, in those three pressings of flesh to flesh, love couldn’t have been the commodity; we made sweat, we made rumpled sheets, we made heavy breathing, we even made orgasms, but love? Love?”

Robert Silverberg book The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 29 (p. 162)

Time , Making love , Bad luck , Thinking

“Research, he calls it. Research.”

Robert Silverberg

Pitkin sneered. “Junkie!”
Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. “Economist!”
Short fiction, Schwartz Between the Galaxies (1974)

“But the mighty computer is stupid. Thinking with the speed of light but unable to cross the gaps of intuition.”

Robert Silverberg book The World Inside

Source: The World Inside (1971), Chapter 7 (p. 483)

Light , Thinking , Speed , Stupidity

“Why should we become like you? We pride ourselves on not being like you.”

Robert Silverberg book The World Inside

Source: The World Inside (1971), Chapter 6 (p. 451)

“When you treat a rational autonomous creature as though he’s a mere beast, what does that make you?”

Robert Silverberg book Downward to the Earth

Source: Downward to the Earth (1970), Chapter 7 (p. 231)

Making love

“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 book Thorns

Source: Thorns (1967), Chapter 21, “And Southward Aye We Fled” (p. 106)

“She shuttled between impish girlhood and neurotic womanhood.”

Robert Silverberg book Thorns

Source: Thorns (1967), Chapter 18, “To the Toy Fair” (p. 85)

“The fascination of what’s difficult,” said Chalk. “It spins the world on its bearings.”

Robert Silverberg book Thorns

Source: Thorns (1967), Chapter 1, “The Song the Neurons Sang” (p. 7)

World