Robert Sheckley Quotes

A tremor ran through him. He had chosen, he reminded himself. He alone was responsible. The psychological test had proved that.
And yet, how responsible were the psychologists who had given him the test? How responsible was Mike Terry for offering a poor man so much money? Society had woven the noose and put it around his neck, and he was hanging himself with it, and calling it free will.

Silversmith lay in bed sipping seltzer and thinking deep brooding thoughts about the impossibility of happiness and the elusiveness of satisfaction. Despite having the world’s luxuries set before him—or because of it—he was bored and had been for weeks. It seemed damned unfair to him, to be able to get anything you wanted, but to be unable to enjoy what you could get.
When you came right down to it, life was a disappointment, and the best it had to offer was never quite good enough. The roast duck was never as crisp as advertised, and the water in the swimming pool was always a shade too warm or too cold.
How elusive was the quest for quality! For ten dollars you could buy a pretty fair steak; for a hundred dollars you could get a really good Porterhouse; for a thousand dollars you could buy a kilo of Kobe beef that had been massaged by the hands of consecrated virgins, together with a genius chef to prepare it. And it would be very good indeed. But not a thousand dollars good. The more you paid, the less progress you made toward that quintessence of beef that that the angels eat when God throws his yearly banquet for the staff.

“Curly,” I say, “I know they can’t help being young, but isn’t there something they can do about being so stupid?”
“I reckon not, Mr. Washburn,” Curly says.

Why, after all, did I have to live with reality? Wasn’t illusion a perfectly suitable condition?

The trip to South Lake took another three hours. Blackwell stared out the window the whole time looking at nothing, which is to say, New Jersey.

That’s the whole point! Anyone can buy sex. Good Lord, it’s the cheapest thing in the universe, next to human life.

But what's it all for?" "That's a stupid question. You might as well ask what reality is for." "Well...what is reality for?

“I’m afraid not. According to the law, you must leave here at once.”
“But they’ll kill me!”
“That’s very true,” Frendlyer said. “Unfortunately, it can’t be helped. A victim, by definition, is one who is to be killed.”
“I thought this was a protective organization.”
“It is. But we protect rights, not victims. Your rights are not being violated.“

Society as a whole, he reminded himself, must be protected against the individual, just as a human body must be protected against malfunction of any of its parts. As fond as you might be of your gall bladder, you would sacrifice it mercilessly if it were going to impair the rest of you.

Marvin did not give way to despair. He gave way instead to anger, which was a much healthier emotion, though equally unproductive.

Then the red telephone rang.
Dickerson’s heart gave a tremendous lurch. He closed his eyes, composing himself by reciting the mantra Dr. Mensch had given him: “Om mane padme hum, I smell the blood of an Englishmun.”

Charlie Gleister had invented a time machine, but he hadn’t invented it right because it didn’t work.

All of us live by the employment of countless untested assumptions, the truth or falsehood of which we can determine only through the hazard of our lives. Since most of us value our lives more than the truth, we leave such drastic tests for the fanatics.

I believe that many people read science fiction for a sense of participation in the wonders to come. The quest for non-ordinary reality is something more than curiosity and wishful thinking. We are too crowded in our every day lives by replicas of ourselves and by the repetitious artifacts of our days and nights. But we do not quite believe in this prosaic world. Continually we are reminded of the strangeness of birth and death, the vastness of time and space, the unknowability of ourselves. One would like to live differently, more significantly. One would like to participate in events more meaningful than our daily round, feel sensations more exquisite than is our usual lot. One reads science fiction in order momentarily to transcend the dull quality of everyday life.
There is a reason behind the search for the ineffable. The death of God is argued by the theologians; but for most of us it is a fact of everyday life. ‘God’ is a word with unfortunate connotations for many. By it I mean the fundamental mystery forever untouched by our rationality.…
This mystery is what we do not have any more. Our meagre substitute is the religion of man living on the Earth. We understand our ethical duties very well, we believe in them and try to follow them. But there is the secret sadness still remaining, the sense that we were born to quest, that our essence is unknowable, that we are plant and phantom, creatures of unknown dimensions. But all we come face to face with is our actual condition: we are ghosts smothered in bread and butter.

“What kind of intelligent beings would evolve on a planet that is all mountains?”
“Stupid ones!” Casker said.