Robert Silverberg citations Page 3

“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

“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.””

Citations de romans, Les Monades urbaines, 1970

Robert Silverberg: Citations en anglais

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

Robert Silverberg livre Lord Valentine's Castle

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

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

Short fiction, Born with the Dead (1974)

“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 livre The Man in the Maze

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

Section 5
Short fiction, Nightwings (1968)

“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 livre Lord Valentine's Castle

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

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

Robert Silverberg livre A Time of Changes

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

“What value is lineage to a drowning man?”

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

“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 livre A Time of Changes

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

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

Robert Silverberg livre A Time of Changes

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

“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?”

Introduction to New Dimensions 1, edited by Robert Silverberg

“Research, he calls it. Research.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Stochastic Man

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

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

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

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

Robert Silverberg livre Les Monades urbaines

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

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

Robert Silverberg livre Les Monades urbaines

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

“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 livre Downward to the Earth

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

“She shuttled between impish girlhood and neurotic womanhood.”

Robert Silverberg livre Thorns

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

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

Robert Silverberg livre Thorns

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

“I have come to prefer something looser, a rough sort of definition which says simply that science fiction attempts to portray that which does not exist, a speculative reality, but endeavors to explore the consequences of such a speculation in a rigorous, systematic, and scientifically plausible way.”

Robert Silverberg livre Thorns

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

“Only a man who doubts his own bravery bristles when called a coward.”

Robert Silverberg livre Thorns

Introduction (p. vi)
Thorns (1967)

“Like all bureaucrats, he was bewildered by an unpredictable development.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Gate of Worlds

Source: The Gate of Worlds (1967), Chapter 7 “We Play a Little Game” (p. 122)

“The more you succeed in making out of yourself, the more bitter a thing it is to have to die.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Gate of Worlds

Source: The Gate of Worlds (1967), Chapter 2 “The Realm of Moctezuma XII” (p. 33)

“Morality after the fact is worse than no morality at all.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Book of Skulls

Source: The Book of Skulls (1972), Chapter 15 (p. 62)

“A man who lies to himself is the worst liar of all.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Book of Skulls

Source: The Book of Skulls (1972), Chapter 7 (p. 25)

“I felt an unmanly pity for the beasts we slew, for I fear I don’t really have the killer instinct. I don’t have the starving instinct either, though, and so I fired away.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Gate of Worlds

Source: The Gate of Worlds (1967), Chapter 9 “To the Western Sea” (p. 162)

“Take this as a bit of easy wisdom: people who try to rule over other people are going to be hated.”

Robert Silverberg livre The Gate of Worlds

Source: The Gate of Worlds (1967), Chapter 9 “To the Western Sea” (p. 158)