Robert Silverberg citations

“Un juif, a dit l'Antarien. Vous vous dites juif, mais qu'est-ce que c'est exactement? (…) — Je ne pratique même pas le judaïsme. Mais mes ancêtres le pratiquaient, aussi je me considère comme juif, bien que… — C'est une religion héréditaire alors. Une religion qui ne requiert pas de ses fidèles qu'ils observent les rites? — En un sens, a répondu Schwartz désespérément. Disons plutôt que c'est un sous-groupe culturel héréditaire découlant d'une conception religieuse commune qui n'a plus rien de significatif. (…) Il y a un code alimentaire compliqué, la pratique de la circoncision pour les nouveau-nés mâles, un rite de passage pour les adolescents, une langue considérée comme sacrée, un langage vernaculaire que tous les Juifs du monde comprennent plus ou moins et beaucoup d'autres choses, y compris un subtil esprit de corps et certaines attitudes comprenant en particulier un style d'humour autodépréciatif tout à fait spécial…”

Citations de romans, Les Monades urbaines, 1970

Robert Silverberg livre Schwartz et les galaxies

Citations de nouvelles, Schwartz et les galaxies

“Mais s'ils n'avaient plus leur travail, […] qu'est-ce que ces pauvres gens feraient de leur vie? Croyez-vous que nous pourrions en faire des poètes? Ou des professeurs d'histoire urbaine? Nous leur créons des emplois délibérément, n'avez-vous pas compris?”

“Dites-moi, a demandé Schwartz d'un ton grave, quelle impression ça fait de savoir qu'on aura dix corps successifs et qu'on vivra plus d'un millier d'années?
— Dites-moi d'abord, a répondu l'Antarien, quelle impression ça fait de savoir qu'on vivra tout au plus quatre-vingt-dix ans et qu'on périra à jamais?”

Citations de romans, Les Monades urbaines, 1970

Robert Silverberg livre Schwartz et les galaxies

Citations de nouvelles, Schwartz et les galaxies

“L'accessibilité totale de tous à tous est la règle essentielle grâce à laquelle une civilisation comme celle-ci peut survivre.”

“Nous aimons la vie. Créer une vie nouvelle est la plus haute des destinées. Empêcher l'éclosion de la vie est le pire des péchés. Nous aimons notre monde toujours en expansion.”

Citations de romans, Les Monades urbaines, 1970

“Le devoir de chacun envers Dieu est de se reproduire.”

Citations de romans, Les Monades urbaines, 1970

“Le refus de toute frustration est la règle de base dans une société telle que la nôtre, où les frictions les plus minimes peuvent conduire à d'incontrôlables oscillations discordantes.”

Citations de romans, Les Monades urbaines, 1970

“L'ancienne philosophie expansionniste-individualiste a été abandonnée ainsi que ses conséquences (à savoir l'ambition territoriale, la mentalité conquistador, la poussée vers le toujours plus loin) au profit d'une sorte de conscience collective centrée sur la croissance ordonnée et illimitée de la race humaine.”

Citations de romans, Les Monades urbaines, 1970

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

Citations de romans, Les Monades urbaines, 1970

Robert Silverberg: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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

Robert Silverberg Dying Inside

Source: Dying Inside

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

Robert Silverberg livre The Man in the Maze

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

“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.”

Section 4
Short fiction, Nightwings (1968)

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

Robert Silverberg livre Lord Valentine's Castle

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

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

Robert Silverberg livre The Stochastic Man

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

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

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

“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 livre A Time of Changes

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

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

Robert Silverberg livre The Man in the Maze

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

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

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

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

Robert Silverberg livre Lord Valentine's Castle

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

“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 livre A Time of Changes

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

“Love of others begins with love of self.”

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

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

Robert Silverberg livre A Time of Changes

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

“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 livre The Stochastic Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Silverberg livre The Man in the Maze

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

““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 livre Lord Valentine's Castle

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

“The cages are ready in case any of the enemies are captured.”
“You mean us?”
“Yes. Enemies.” Muller’s eyes glittered with sudden paranoid fury; it was alarming how easily he slipped from rational discourse to that cold blaze. “Homo sapiens. The most dangerous, the most ruthless, the most despicable beast in the universe!”
“You say it as if you believe it.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Man in the Maze

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

““Research, he calls it. Research.” Pitkin sneered. “Junkie!”
Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. “Economist!””

Robert Silverberg livre The Man in the Maze

“I do.”
Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 8 (p. 118)

“Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.”

Short fiction, Schwartz Between the Galaxies (1974)

“Stand near me and you get sick. Why? It reminds you that you’re an animal too, because you get a full dose of me. So we go round and round in our endless feedback. You hate me because you learn things about your own soul by getting near me. And I hate you because you must draw back from me. What I am, you see, is a plague carrier, and the plague I carry is the truth. My message is that it’s a lucky thing for humanity that we’re shut up each in his own skull. Because if we had even a little drop of telepathy, even the blurry nonverbal thing I’ve got, we’d be unable to stand each other. Human society would be impossible.”

Source: Short fiction, The Emperor and the Maula (2007), p. 443

“I don't know, Mattison thinks. That’s cool. I don't know, and I hereby give myself permission not to know, and to hell with it.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 8 (p. 120)

“Architecturally, the town looked like the worst of all possible cheap-and-sleazy tract developments, but the psychic texture it projected was even more depressing, more like that of one of those ghastly retirement communities, one of the innumerable Leisure Worlds or Sun Manors, those childless joyless retreats where colonies of that other kind of living dead collected to await the last trumpet.”

Source: Short fiction, Hot Times in Magma City (1995), p. 104

“All true enlightenment is illegal at first, within its context.”

Short fiction, Born with the Dead (1974)

“The Barjazid does not yet rule as an absolute tyrant, for that might turn the people against him, and he is still insecure in his power—while you live. But he rules for himself and for his family, not for Majipoor. He lacks a sense of right, and does only what seems useful and expedient. As his confidence grows, so too will his crimes, until Majipoor groans under the whip of a monster.”

Robert Silverberg livre A Time of Changes

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

“All my life,” said Schweiz, “has been a quest for plausible reasons to believe in what I know to be irrational.”

Robert Silverberg livre Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 3, Chapter 11 (p. 329)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“The style in which it was written told me much: I found that a man who cannot phrase his thoughts cleanly on paper probably has no thoughts worth notice.”

Robert Silverberg livre A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 53 (p. 168)