Roger Zelazny: Trending quotes

“… even a mirror will not show you yourself, if you do not wish to see.”

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 1 (pp. 29-30)

“There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living.”

Source: Lord of Light

Roger Zelazny book This Immortal

Source: This Immortal

“Sleep is perhaps the only among life's great pleasures which need not be of short duration.”

Roger Zelazny Knight of Shadows

Source: Knight of Shadows

“The day of battle dawned pink as the fresh-bitten thigh of a maiden.”

“His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.”

Source: Lord of Light

“Do you work for the government, any government?”
"I pay taxes, which means I work for the government, part of the time. Yes.”

Source: Lord of Light

“Love is a negative form of hatred.”

Source: My Name is Legion

Roger Zelazny book This Immortal

Source: This Immortal

“Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?"

"Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.”

“Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.”

Source: Lord of Light

“The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.”

Source: Power & Light

Roger Zelazny book The Dream Master

He Who Shapes (1965)
Source: The Dream Master

“Strygalldwir is my name. Conjure with it and I will eat your heart and liver."

"Conjure with it? I can't even pronounce it, and my cirrhosis would give you indigestion.”

Roger Zelazny book The Guns of Avalon

Source: The Guns of Avalon

“I'm a lost soul. Wewail.”

Roger Zelazny book Jack of Shadows

Source: Jack of Shadows

“It is anticipation and recollection that fill the heart—never the sensation of the moment.”

“I'd had a long talk with Bob Silverberg, who was very influential on my early career. He'd, out of the kindness of his heart, at a convention told me that he thought I'd made several mistakes in the way I was disposing of my stories. And I said, "I don't understand what you mean, but I'll be glad to buy you a few drinks, if you'll tell me about it". So we adjourned to the bar and sat there a couple of hours. He was drinking Bloody Marys back then; I was drinking Black Russians. And he told me all sorts of things which carried me over the next several years; it was a lot of information for a couple of drinks. He told me that the first thing I should do if I wanted to write full-time was to get a really good agent. He said that after a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end.
Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent.”

Source: Threshold

“For me, I have seen worlds and people begin and end, actually and metaphorically, and it will always be the same. It’s always fire and water.
No matter what your scientific background, emotionally you’re an alchemist. You live in a world of liquids, solids, gases and heat-transfer effects that accompany their changes of state. These are the things you perceive, the things you feel. Whatever you know about their true natures is rafted on top of that. So, when it comes to the day-to-day sensations of living, from mixing a cup of coffee to flying a kite, you treat with the four ideal elements of the old philosophers: earth, air, fire, water.
Let’s face it, air isn’t very glamorous, no matter how you look at it. I mean, I’d hate to be without it, but it’s invisible and so long as it behaves itself it can be taken for granted and pretty much ignored. Earth? The trouble with earth is that it endures. Solid objects tend to persist with a monotonous regularity.
Not so fire and water, however. They’re formless, colorful, and they’re always doing something. While suggesting you repent, prophets very seldom predict the wrath of the gods in terms of landslides and hurricanes. No. Floods and fires are what you get for the rottenness of your ways. Primitive man was really on his way when he learned to kindle the one and had enough of the other nearby to put it out. It is coincidence that we’ve filled hells with fires and oceans with monsters? I don’t think so. Both principles are mobile, which is generally a sign of life. Both are mysterious and possess the power to hurt or kill. It is no wonder that intelligent creatures the universe over have reacted to them in a similar fashion. It is the alchemical response.”

Phlogiston interview (1995)

“The stars blazed like the love of God, cold and distant.”

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 6 (pp. 137-138)

“So do not speak to me of souls when you have never seen one, man.”

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 4 (p. 87)

Roger Zelazny book Jack of Shadows

Source: Jack of Shadows (1971), Chapter 6 (p. 63)

“It is a city of neat cottages and cobbled streets where wander cats without number, for the enlightened legislators of long ago laid down laws for our protection. A good, kind village, where travelers take their ease and pet the cats, making much of them, which is as it should be.”

Roger Zelazny book A Night in the Lonesome October

October 22 (p. 160)
A Night in the Lonesome October (1993)

“Nick swore he’d die with this boots on, on some exotic safari, but he found his Kilimanjaro in a hospital on Earth, where they’d cured everything that was bothering him, except for the galloping pneumonia he’d picked up in the hospital. That had been, roughly, two hundred and fifty years ago. I’d been a pallbearer.”