Robert Silverberg

Quotes

1. 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.

   p. 62

2. 

   Contrast is everything, Ned said. Incongruity is essential. The secret of art lies in attaining a sense of proper juxtapositions, and what is religion if not a category of art?

   p. 70

3. 

   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.

   p. 11

4. 

   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.

   p. 21

5. 

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

   p. 168

6. 

   “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.”

   p. 33

7. 

   We are born by accident into a purely random universe.

   p. 1

8. 

   Morality after the fact, said Eli from the rear, is worse than no morality at all.

   p. 25

9. 

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

   p. 62

10. 

    Love of others begins with love of self.

    p. 126

11. 

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

    p. 110

12. 

    Why should that be, LuAnn? Why should we be put into such a wonderful world and then have everything taken away from us? God’s will? No, LuAnn, God is love, and God wouldn’t have done such a cruel thing to us, so therefore there is no God, there’s only death, Death, whom we must reject.

    p. 29