Walter Tevis Quotes

I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.

I looked at Annabel’s coffin in front of me and said, “I am the resurrection and the life,” saith the Lord. “He that believeth in me, though he perish, yet shall he live.”
The words were no comfort. I wanted Annabelle to be alive and with me. I looked at all the Baleens in front of me with their heads reverently bowed and I felt no communion with them and with their faith. Without Annabel I was alone again.

But most of all, it seems to me now, has been the courage to know and to sense my feelings that has come, slowly, from the emotionally charged silent films at the old library at first and then later from the poems and novels and histories and biographies and how-to-do-it books that I have read. All of those books—even the dull and nearly incomprehensible ones—have made me understand more clearly what it means to be a human being. And I have learned from the sense of awe I at times develop when I feel in touch with the mind of another, long-dead person and know that I am not alone on this earth. There have been others who have felt as I feel and who have, at times, been able to say the unsayable.

I knew that there had been books in the ancient world, of course, and that most of them were probably from that time before television, but I had no idea there were that many.

What is my Individuality good for, anyway? And is it truly holy, or was I only taught that because the robots who taught me were programmed by someone, once, to say it?

Why don’t we talk to one another? Why don’t we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets of this city? Once, long ago, there were private telephones in New York. People talked to one another then—perhaps distantly, strangely, with their voices made thin and artificial by electronics, but they talked. Of the price of groceries, the presidential elections, the sexual behavior of their teen-age children, their fear of the weather and their fear of death. And they read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquent silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said; I am human. I talk and I listen and I read.
Why can no one read? What happened?

He thought, looking at the cat, if only you were the intelligent species on this world. And then, smiling wryly, maybe you are.

Whatever Jesus was, he was a thing called a “great man.” I am not certain I like the idea of “great men”; it makes me uncomfortable. “Great men” often have had very bloody plans for mankind.

"There may be such a thing as human destiny," Newton said, "but I rather imagine it resembles passenger-pigeon destiny."

He had never seen anything funny about monkeys.

Smart is smart. I’m glad there’s some around somewhere.

"I'm like everybody else. This kind of living ain't much better than being dead." He laughed again, shaking his head from side to side. "And it ain't much better on the outside, to tell the truth. No real work to do, except the same kind of crap you do in here. At the Worker Dormitories they told us, 'Labor fulfills.' Horseshit."

“We must remember that the United States, regardless of what the uninformed may say, is not a second-rate power. We must remember that freedom will conquer, we must…”
Suddenly Newton realized that the man speaking was the President of the United States, and he was speaking the bombast of the hopeless.

When literacy died, so had history.

I was in a state of yearning, and I had been for years. I was not happy—had almost never been happy.
This is terrible! I thought. All those lies! I felt physically sick to see it all: to see myself slack-jawed as a child in front of the television, to see myself in classes being told by robot teachers that “inward development” was the aim of life, that “quick sex is best,” that the only reality was in my consciousness and that it could be altered chemically. What I had wanted, what I had yearned for even then, was to be loved. And to love. And they had not even taught me the word.