Robert Silverberg Quotes

I have lost my sense of a universe. They say this is the richest era of human existence; but I think a man can be richer in knowing every atom of a single golden island in a blue sea than by spending his days striding among all the worlds.

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.

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

She shuttled between impish girlhood and neurotic womanhood.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Why conjure up galactic spaceships when meteors were so common?

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.

The process of changing your mind is a tricky one. You start at Position A, which you hold with stern stubbornness, resolving never to give it up. Then you start to question your original resolution. Is it wise to be so stubborn? Perhaps you should consider alternate ideas. You revise your original inflexibility a little, abandoning Position A and adopting Position B, which is very much like it in most ways, with only a few ifs and maybes added. Then, by a gradual series of compromises, private deals, and shifts of purpose, you slide spinelessly through the alphabet until you arrive at Position Z, the total opposite of your original point of view.

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

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.