Robert Silverberg citations Page 2

“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

“It did not seem at all improbable to McCulloch now. The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus.”

Citations de romans, Les Monades urbaines, 1970

Robert Silverberg: Citations en anglais

“She loaned him books. Worlds were revealed to him: worlds piled on worlds, worlds without end.”

Short fiction, Homefaring (1983)

“Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.”

Source: Short fiction, A Piece of the Great World (2005), p. 79

“May I be struck dead for saying this if I don’t mean it with all my heart: I wish the Lord and all his prophets would disappear and leave us alone. We’ve had enough religion for one season.”

Robert Silverberg livre Up the Line

Source: Up the Line (1969), Chapter 4

“In the absolute universe all events can be regarded as absolutely deterministic, and if we can’t perceive the greater structures, it’s because our vision is faulty. If we had a real grasp of causality down to the molecular level, we wouldn’t need to rely on mathematical approximations, on statistics and probabilities, in making predictions. If our perceptions of cause and effect were only good enough, we’d be able to attain absolute knowledge of what is to come. We would make ourselves all-seeing.”

Source: Short fiction, Thomas the Proclaimer (1972), Chapter 11, “The March to the Sea” (p. 110)

“As we zoomed along on the Chaos Express, I was sometimes tempted toward godliness the way the godly are tempted toward sin. But my love of divine reason left me no way to opt for the irrational.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 3 (p. 11)

“My only regrets were for poor tactics, not for faulty principles.”

Source: Short fiction, Thomas the Proclaimer (1972), Chapter 3, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (p. 77)

“My life was in crisis. All my values were becoming meaningless. I was discovering that my chosen profession was empty, foolish, as useless as—as playing chess.”

Robert Silverberg livre A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 70 (p. 204)

“How intricately our loins are linked to our minds, and how tricky a thing it is when we embrace a woman while pretending she is another!”

Short fiction, Schwartz Between the Galaxies (1974)

“It is my craft and my science to Watch. It is yours to jeer. Each of us to our specialty.”

Robert Silverberg livre A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 25 (p. 85)

“We are born by accident into a purely random universe.”

Section 1
Short fiction, Nightwings (1968)

“He didn’t have to observe the niceties of etiquette when talking to a computer.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 1, (p. 1; opening words)

“I’m asking you to do an unpleasant thing for a decent motive. You don’t want to do it, and I understand how you feel, but I’m trying to get you to see that your personal moral code isn’t always the highest factor. In wartime, a soldier shoots to kill because the universe imposes that situation on him. It may be an unjust war, and that might be his brother in the ship he’s aiming at, but the war is real and he has his role.”
“Where’s the room for free will in this mechanical universe of yours, Charles?”
“There isn’t any. That’s why I say the universe stinks.”
“We have no freedom at all?”
“The freedom to wriggle a little on the hook.”
“Have you felt this way all your life?”
“Most of it,” Boardman said.
“When you were my age?”

Short fiction, Born with the Dead (1974)

“But why?” he asked Deliamber.
The Vroon replied, “Why? is a useless question in matters of spiritual progress.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Man in the Maze

“Even earlier.”
Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 4, section 3 (p. 73)

“Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.”

Robert Silverberg livre Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 3, Chapter 8 (p. 301)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“Autobiography. Apparently one should not name the names of those one has been to bed with, or give explicit figures on the amount of money one has earned, those being the two data most eagerly sought by readers; all the rest is legitimate to reveal.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 29 (p. 161)

“We are not accustomed to threats here,” Lorivade declared.
“I make no threat. I speak only of inevitable consequences.”

"Sounding Brass, Tinkling Cymbal" in Hell's Cartographers (1975) edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison

“Am I loyal, or am I loyal? But I don’t like the way things are going. It’s a citizen’s right to worry about the state of the realm, isn’t it? If matters are not to our liking, we should speak up. That’s our tradition, isn’t it? If we allow small abuses now, who knows what sort of things he’ll be doing five years on!”

Robert Silverberg livre Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 3, Chapter 10 (p. 317)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“So it is with all the great leaders: the commodity they have to sell is personality. Mere ideas can be left to lesser men.”

Robert Silverberg livre Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 1 “The Book of the King of Dreams”, Chapter 8 (p. 48)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“Political theorists tend to swallow their theories when forced back on pragmatic measures of survival.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 13 (p. 73)

“Schwartz closed his eyes. “My grandmother told me never to get mixed up with economists. Their thinking is muddy and their breath is bad, she said. She also warned me against Yale men. Perverts of the intellect, she called them. So here I am cooped up on an interstellar ship with five hundred alien creatures and one fellow human, and he has to be an economist from Yale.””

Section 5
Short fiction, Hawksbill Station (1967)

“How frail, he thought, is the compact that holds our government together! Good will alone is all that sustains it.”

Short fiction, Schwartz Between the Galaxies (1974)

“Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody’s thought it.”

Robert Silverberg livre Lord Valentine's Castle

Book 5, Chapter 6 (p. 442)
Lord Valentine's Castle (1980)

“I never became a believer. I had a natural predisposition toward skepticism. If you can’t measure it, it isn’t there. That included not only Old Whiskers and His Only Begotten Son, but all the other mystic baggage that people liked to carry around in those tense credulous years: the flying saucers, Zen Buddhism, the Atlantis cult, Hare Krishna, macrobiotics, telepathy and other species of extrasensory perception, theosophy, entropy-worship, astrology, and such. I was willing to accept neutrinos, quasars, the theory of continental drift, and the various species of quarks, because I respected the evidence for their existence; I couldn’t buy the other stuff, the irrational stuff, the assorted opiates of the masses, When the Moon is in the seventh house, etc., etc.—sorry, no.”

Short fiction, Born with the Dead (1974)

““This isn’t just consulting work, Haig. It means going into politics.”
“So?”
“What do I need it for?”
“Nobody needs anything except a little food and water now and then. The rest is preferences.””

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

“Forget it. No, don’t forget it. Don’t forget anything. Take a lesson from it: collect all the data before shouting nonsense.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 8 (p. 33)

“Never pass by a chance to shut up.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 1, section 3 (p. 18)

“Was that, too, destined to thrive awhile and decay and vanish, and be replaced by another, Nortekku wondered? Probably. The earth changes, he thought. Mountains rise, are ground to dust, give way to plains and valleys. Shorelines are drowned; new islands are thrust upward out of the sea. Civilizations are born, die, are forgotten. The planet alone abides, and all that dwells upon it is transient.
Contemplating these things, he felt much the richer for all his freshly acquired knowledge. He felt that for the first time he comprehended, at least some small way, the great chain of existence, stretching across time from misty past to unborn future.”

Source: Short fiction, The Emperor and the Maula (2007), p. 477

“No man ever looked more like a President than Harding; it was his only qualification for the job, but it was enough to get him there.”

Source: Short fiction, A Piece of the Great World (2005), p. 80

“What matters,” he said earnestly, “is the display of skill, not the manners of the audience.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 12 (p. 55)