Spider Robinson Quotes

“To all the Callahan's Places there ever were or ever will be,” Spider Robinson says, “whatever they may be called—and to all the merry maniacs and happy fools who are fortunate enough to stumble into one: may none of them arrive too late!”

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

If we have to, we can all go to Hell together—maybe there’s a group rate.

Next morning I decided that hangovers are like sex—the second time isn’t quite as painful. If the analogy held, by tomorrow I’d be enjoying it.

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

You humans are at least aware of that supreme paradox—that free will exists to an extent for the individual, but disappears in the group—although you can’t work with it.

The prime datum of the Universe is that life survives by eating life, and no other way. The expense of eating is, in great part, the resistance the second life offers to being eaten.

Tom said what struck him was how little progress churches have made in two hundred years toward convincing people that the unknown is not by definition evil.

A man should live forever, or die trying.

She was pretty enough to make a preacher kick a hole in a stained-glass window.

Just as there are Laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed.
But one can be converted into the other.

“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.”

I mean, progress is something with no pity and no purpose. It just happens. It chews up all you ever knew and spits out things you can’t understand and the only value it seems to have is to make a few people a lot of money. What the hell is the sense of progress anyway?

In a culture where pessimism has metastasized like slow carcinoma, that crazy Irishman was backward enough to try to raise hopes, like hothouse flowers. In an era during which even judicious use of alcohol has been increasingly bad-rapped, the man who came to be known as The Mick of Time was backward enough to think that the world can look just that essential tad better when seen through a glass, brightly. (As long as you let someone else drive you home afterward.) Above all, he—and his goofball customers—believed that shared pain is lessened, and shared Joy increased.
Now he is gone. Gone back whence he came, and we are all the poorer for it. But I refuse to say that we will not see his like again. Or his love again.

Okay, I grant you the provisional status of human beings. Let’s deal.