Walter Tevis Quotes

"Would you show me how to make an omelette?"
She looked shocked, and said nothing.
Then from the sink the other woman's voice said, "Men don't cook."
The woman beside me hesitated a moment, and then said softly, "This man is different, Mary. He's a Reader."

The woman stared at me. “You don’t know a church of the living God when you see one?”
I looked around me, at the aisles covered with plastic-sealed merchandise, at the racks of colored clothing and electronic equipment and rifles and golf clubs and jackets. “But this is no church,” I said. “This is a store.”

It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fire—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium.

When literacy died, so had history.

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?

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.

We had never developed a sense of history as such; all we knew, if we ever thought about it, was that there had been others before us and that we were better than they. But no one was ever encouraged to think about anything outside of himself. “Don’t ask; relax.”

Holy Bible begins: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It does not give the century of the “beginning,” nor is it clear who “God” is, or was. I am not certain whether Holy Bible is a book of history or maintenance or poetry. It names many strange people who do not seem real.

"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."

I must get inside that library! I must have books again. If I cannot read and learn and have things that are worth thinking about, I would rather immolate myself than go on living.

Bob seems to know almost everything; but he doesn’t know when or why people stopped reading. “Most people are too lazy,” he said. “They only want distractions.”

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?

Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of the ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth ages. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count.

They had told us how important courts were for protecting our sacred rights to Privacy and Individuality, and how helpful a judge could be, but you somehow got the idea that it was a good idea to stay away from courts altogether.

Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.