Robert Silverberg

Quotes

1. Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.

2. 

   She shuttled between impish girlhood and neurotic womanhood.

   p. 85

3. 

   Of course, Chalk had little need for further money. It had motivated him once, but not now. Nor did the acquisition of greater power please him much. Despite the customary theories, Chalk had attained sufficient power so that he was willing to stop expanding if only he could be sure of holding what he had. No, it was something else, something inner, that governed his decisions now. When the love of money and the love of power are both sated, the love of love remains.

   p. 29

4. 

   The priest had once told Rosita Estancia that her younger brother Charley was a damned soul, and Charley had found out about it. In a way, he was rather flattered.

   p. 7

5. 

   Why conjure up galactic spaceships when meteors were so common?

   p. 26

6. 

   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.

7. 

   Evidently a lot of people were yelling “Flying saucer!” tonight, because the announcers were going to great pains to insist that it was nothing but a meteor.

   p. 29

8. 

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

   p. 7

9. 

   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.

   p. 106

10. 

    “Do I chatter?”

    “Should I be honest or should I be tactful?”

    p. 106

11. 

    If the Government was going to all this trouble to keep people calm, then there had to be something big to worry about. That much was axiomatic.

    p. 29

12. 

    But, though he trusted his intuitive judgments, he rarely acted on them until he had had time to make a more rational reconnaissance.

    p. 27