Robert Silverberg

Quotes

1. What value is lineage to a drowning man?

   p. 142

2. 

   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!

   p. 85

3. 

   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.

   p. 55

4. 

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

   p. 25

5. 

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

   p. 231

6. 

   Nothing was his business, these days. When a man had no business, he had to appoint himself to some. So he was here to do research, ostensibly, which is to say to snoop and spy.

   p. 180

7. 

   What counts is what’s happening inside him, his own artistic fulfillment. If he can blow their skulls, that’s a bonus. But this is ecstasy. The whole universe is vibrating around him. A gigantic solo. God himself must have felt this way when he got to work on the first day.

   p. 368

8. 

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

   p. 483

9. 

   She seems fond of him. Getting to know him better, as though she has surmounted the barrier of cultural differences that made him seem so alien to her before. And he the same with her. The separations dwindling. Her world is not his, but he thinks he could adjust to some of its unfamiliar assumptions. Strike up a closeness. He’s a man, she’s a woman, right? The basics. All the rest is façade.

   p. 454

10. 

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

    p. 451

11. 

    Now, you know I’m no bigot, Lorie. I don’t care how many eyes, tentacles, eating orifices, or antennae an organism happens to have, so long as it knows its stuff. What I object to is having someone who is professionally inferior jacked into an expedition simply for the sake of racial balance.

    p. 14

12. 

    The funeral customs of alien races defy all comprehension. So do the funeral customs of non-alien races. Can you explain to me the virtue of putting dead people in a box and burying the box in the ground?

    p. 95