Roger Zelazny Quotes

Ill met by moonlight,' said Deirdre.
'You could still be tied to a stake,' said Random, and she did not reply.

"Once a Buddha, always a Buddha, Sam. Dust off some of your old parables. You have about fifteen minutes.'
Sam held out his hand. "Give me some tobacco and a paper.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

As a student of business administration, I know that there is a law of evolution for organizations as stringent and inevitable as anything in life. The longer one exists, the more it grinds out restrictions that slow its own functions. It reaches entropy in a state of total narcissism. Only the people sufficiently far out in the field get anything done, and every time they do they are breaking half a dozen rules in the process.

I intend to do that after dinner," he stated, "because I believe in the ritualistic value of rescue-motions. They shall be made."

I have always found that hell is other people.

I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.

Then the fit hit the Shan.

I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.

I wasn’t disappointed, inasmuch as I expected nothing.

Life is seldom so pivotally crisis-conditioned a thing as novelists would have us believe. While it is true that we sometimes recover from shocks with a sense of the freshness of reality and the wonder of existence, this state of mind does pass away—and fairly rapidly, at that—leaving both reality and ourselves untransfigured once more.

"Then it is impossible to get an honest answer from you."
"If by 'honest answer' you mean for me to say what you want me to say, whether or not it is true, then I would say that you are correct."

Reality is approximately as dependable as a politician’s promise... the result is the same: Reality, of the capital “R” variety, has become as relative a thing as the dryness of our respective Martinis. Yet the struggle goes on, the fight continues. Against what? Ultimately, Powers, Principalities, Thrones, and Dominations, often contained in hosts who are themselves victims, prisoners, manipulated men and women.

I feel obligated to point out, though, that I have always been a sucker for ideas I find aesthetically pleasing. The cosmic sweep of the thing - an interstellar kula chain - affirming the differences and at the same time emphasizing the similarities of all the intelligent races in the galaxy - tying them together, building common traditions... The notion strikes me as kind of fine.

Then every man would be as a god, you see. The result of this, of course, would be that there would no longer be any gods, only men. We would give them knowledge of the sciences and the arts, which we possess, and in so doing we would destroy their simple faith and remove all basis for their hoping that things will be better — for the best way to destroy faith or hope is to let it be realized.