Spider Robinson Quotes

Doc Webster's eyes rolled briefly, like loaded dice, and came up snake eyes.

If you’re under 35, and not passionately interested in health food, this one may go over your head. If so, count your blessings: Until very recently, a tribe of killer monkeys lived undetected beneath Greenwich village. To some extent it was not surprising that they escaped notice for so long. They had extremely odd sleeping habits, hibernating for 364 days out of every year (365 in Leap Years) and emerging from the caverns of the Village sewers only on Christmas Day. Even so, one might have thought they could hardly help but cause talk, since they tended when awake to be enormous, ferocious, carnivorous, and extremely hungry. Yet in Greenwich Village of all places on Earth they went unnoticed until last year, when they were finally destroyed. Everyone knows that Yule Gibbons ate only nuts and fruits…

Dreams should be forgotten when we wake. Or one day we will find ourselves unable to sleep.

Me, I have a science fiction writer's conviction that the damn robot is supposed to speak
human, not the other way around.

There's a price for absolution on this planet, and it's called penance.

Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased; thus do we refute entropy.

I think of us as a people who inoculate ourselves against a plague of insanity with a powerful anti-idiotic called science fiction. I think sf is a literature which by its very nature requires that you be at least a little sane, that you know at least a little something. You must abdicate the right to be ignorant in order to enjoy science fiction, which most people are unwilling to do; and you must learn, if not actually how to think things through, at least what the trick looks like when it's done. Frequent injections will keep a lot of madness away.

Noi tendiamo a confondere qualunque numero sufficientemente alto con il concetto d'infinito. [...] amiamo l'idea d'infinito. Un problema che include l'infinito è di facile soluzione. (Elefanti malinconici)

Nikky has more fiber than I do, I guess: he doesn't let a little thing like death slow him down.

It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand? That lemming drive you're talking about is there — but there's another kind of drive, another kind of force that's working against it. Or else there wouldn't still be any people and there wouldn't be the words to have this conversation and—" She paused, looked down at herself. "And I wouldn't be here to say them.

Animated the face might have been beautiful — any set of features can support beauty — but even a superb makeup job could not have made her pretty.

You can show a dozen guys murderin' each other on TV but you can't ever show two people making love. A naked blade is reckoned to be less obscene than a naked woman.

“You know,” he said with a dangerous high note in his voice, “in all the nine years the prayers never stopped rising from that filthy little cell. For the first three years we prayed that someone would depose El Supremo. For approximately the next three years Mary prayed constantly that my faith in God would return. Then, for about a year I prayed to I-don’t-know-who that Mary would live. And after malaria took her, I spent my time praying to anyone who would listen for a chance to kill El Supremo with my own hands.”

Mrs. Martin, I happen to be committed to a course of action. That does not mean I don't care whether the action is good or bad.

A man should live forever, or die trying.