Walter Tevis Quotes

All day yesterday she read a new kind of writing called poems. Some of them she read aloud. In places they were like chess—incomprehensible—and in other places they said strange and interesting things.

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 it exactly that you do with a book?"
"You read it."
"Oh," she said. And then, "What does read mean?"
I nodded. Then I began turning the pages of the book I was holding and said, "Some of these markings here represent sounds. And the sounds make words. You look at the marks and sounds come into your mind and, after you practice long enough, they begin to sound like hearing a person talking. Talking—but silently."

"You know," she said, "they teach you that robots are made to serve humans. But the way they say that word 'serve' it sounds like 'control.' My father—Simon—called it 'politician talk.'"

It is the greatest achievement of my life. Yes, I have used that word: a great achievement. My learning to read was an achievement. Nobody knows that but me.

Noticing and thinking are sometimes a strain and a bafflement and I wonder if the Designers were aware of that when they made it almost impossible for the ordinary citizen to make use of a recorder. Or when they had us all taught that earliest learned wisdom: “When in doubt, forget it.”

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

"I want you to save the world, Mr. Newton."
Newton's smile did not change, and his reply was immediate. "Is it worth saving, Nathan?"

He had never seen anything funny about monkeys.

He carried his bag and was accompanied by a nurse with a deliberately impassive face—the sort of face that seemed to say, “I don’t care what you die of, I intend to be efficient about my part of it.”

"Do you realize that you will not only wreck your civilization, such as it is, and kill most of your people; but that you will also poison the fish in your rivers, the squirrels in your trees, the flocks of birds, the soil, the water? There are times when you seem, to us, like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statuary with hammers."
For a moment Bryce did not speak. Then he said, "But it was human beings who painted the pictures, made the statues."
"Only a few human beings," Newton said. "Only a few."

“We won’t necessarily become extinct. Disarmament is being negotiated. Not all of us are insane.”
“But most of you are. Enough of you are—it only requires a few insane ones, in the right places.

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

"But, damn it, you're not gods."
"No, but have your gods ever saved you before?"
"I don't know. No, of course not."

It always horrified Bryce to see professors fawn on businessmen—the very men they ridiculed in their private conversations—whenever a research contract might be in the offing.