Roger Zelazny Quotes

It would be an act of wisdom to depart immediately… but wisdom is itself the product of knowledge; and knowledge, unfortunately, is generally the product of foolish doings. So, to add to my own knowledge and to enhance my wisdom I shall remain another day, to see what occurs.

It was almost a mystical experience. I do not know how else to put it. My mind outran time as he neared, and it was as though I had an eternity to ponder the approach of this man who was my brother. His garments were filthy, his face blackened, the stump of his right arm raised, gesturing anywhere. The great beast that he rode was striped, black and red, with a wild red mane and tail. But it really was a horse, and its eyes rolled and there was foam at its mouth and its breathing was painful to hear. I saw then that he wore his blade slung across his back, for its haft protruded high above his right shoulder. Still slowing, eyes fixed upon me, he departed the road, bearing slightly toward my left, jerked the reins once and released them, keeping control of the horse with his knees. His left hand went up in a salute-like movement that passed above his head and seized the hilt of his weapon. It came free without a sound, describing a beautiful arc above him and coming to rest in a lethal position out from his left shoulder and slanting back, like a single wing of dull steel with a minuscule line of edge that gleamed like a filament of mirror. The picture he presented was burned into my mind with a kind of magnificence, a certain splendor that was strangely moving. The blade was a long, scythe like affair that I had seen him use before. Only then we had stood as allies against a mutual foe I had begun to believe unbeatable. Benedict had proved otherwise that night. Now that I sa

Such
times are rare, such times are fleeting, but always bright when caught, measured, hung, and later regarded
in times of adversity, there in the kinder halls of memory, against the flapping of the flames.

Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when don't want them to.

A bizarrerie of fires, cunabulum of light, it moved with a deft, almost dainty deliberation, phasing into and out of existence like a storm-shot piece of evening; or perhaps the darkness between the flares was more akin to its truest nature swirl of black ashes assembled in prancing cadence to the lowing note of desert wind down the arroyo behind buildings as empty yet filled as the pages of unread books or stillnesses between the notes of a song.

Grief and anger shrink my world, and I resent this. They seem to paralyze my memory of happier times, of friends, places, things; options. Squeezed by the grip of intense, unsettling emotion, I grow smaller in my single-mindedness. I suppose it is partly because I have discarded a range of choices, impairing in some measure my freedom of will. I don't like this, but after a point I have small control over it. It makes me feel that I have surrendered to a kind of determinism, which irritates me even more. Then, vicious cycle, this feeds back into the emotion that drives me and intensifies it. The simple way of ending this situation is the headlong rush to remove its object. The difficult way is more philosophical, a drawing back, the reestablishment of control. As usual, the difficult way is preferable. A headlong rush may also result in a broken neck.

Siddhartha considered the ways of the demon, and in that moment he struck.

How can you treat death so lightly?" she asks.
"Because it happens," he replies. "It is inevitable. I do not mourn the falling of a leaf or the breaking of a wave. I do not sorrow for a shooting star as it burns itself up in the atmosphere. Why should I?

Of all my relations, I like sex the best and Eric the least.

We talked the moon out of heavens before either of us grew tired.

After a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end. Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent.

She finished her drink and put it down.
"It's getting chilly out here."
"Yes."
"Let us repair within."
"I'd like to repair."
I put down my cigar and we stood and she kissed me. So I put my arm around her trim and sparkling, blue-kept waist and we moved away from the bar, toward the archway, through the archway and beyond, into the house we were leaving.
Let's make it a triple-asterisk break:
***

Beyond the River of the Blessed, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Avalon. Our swords were shattered in our hands and we hung our shields on the oak tree. The silver towers were fallen, into a sea of blood. How many miles to Avalon? None, I say, and all. The silver towers are fallen.
... waters,where the stars shone like bonfires at night and the green of day was always the green of spring. Youth, love, beauty-I knew them in Avalon. Proud steeds, bright metal, soft lips, dark ale. Honor ...

Personal feelings don't make for good politics, legal decisions, or business deals.

Between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today.

The Keeper of Clouds has unpenned his charges.
The Keeper of Winds has unlocked his gates.
The Keeper of Waters has opened the sky.
The Keeper of Lightnings waves his lances.
The Keeper of satellites has observed,
'One hundred percent of probability of precipitation.

The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.

One of the disadvantages of traveling alone is that when you fall there is none to assist you.

I was not always that way, but perhaps the shadow Earth, where I spent so many years, mellowed me a bit, and maybe my hitch in the dungeons of Amber reminded me somewhat of the quality of human suffering. I do not know. I only know that I could not pass by the hurt I saw on the form of someone much like someone who had once been a friend.

A single name of a multitude of practices centered about the auto-driven auto. Flashing across the country in the sure hands of an invisible chauffeur, windows all opaque, night dark, sky high, tires assailing the road below like four phantom buzzsaws - and starting from scratch and ending in the same place, and never knowing where you are going or where you have been - it is possible, for a moment, to kindle some feeling of individuality in the coldest brainpan, to produce a momentary awareness of self by virtue of an apartness from all but a sense of motion. This is because movement through darkness is the ultimate abstraction of life itself - at least that's what one of the Vital Comedians said, and everybody in the place laughed.

A totally nondenominational prayer: Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that I be forgiven for anything I may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which I may be eligible after the destruction of my body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.

My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.

When inspiration is silent reason tires quickly.

Then every man would be as a god, you see. The result of this, of course, would be that there would no longer be any gods, only men. We would give them knowledge of the sciences and the arts, which we possess, and in so doing we would destroy their simple faith and remove all basis for their hoping that things will be better - for the best way to destroy faith or hope is to let it be realized.

I decided that mankind could live better without gods. If I disposed of them all, people could start having can openers and cans to open again, and things like that, without fearing the wrath of Heaven. We've stepped on these poor fools enough. I wanted to give them a chance to be free, to build what they wanted.

I was willing to die fighting, but it was senseless for all these men to go down with me. Perhaps my blood was tainted, despite my power over the Pattern. A true prince of Amber should have had no such qualms. I decided then that my centuries on the Shadow Earth had changed me, softened me perhaps, had done something to me which made me unlike my brothers.

The dead are too much with us.

To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, I wish I had known this some time ago.

There is Shadow and there is Substance, and this is the root of all things. Of Substance, there is only Amber, the real city, upon the real Earth, which contains everything. Of Shadow, there is an infinitude of things. Every possibility exists somewhere as a Shadow of the real.

Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You've crossed through nothingness or dream to another island in Time.

Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.

Go and copulate with yon purple lizard.

My mind spun for a second before it drifted, and in that second I knew that of all pleasures a drink of cold water when you are thirsty, liquor when you are not, sex, a cigarette after many days without one there is none of them can compare with sleep. Sleep is best ...

You are one of the few successful persons I know."
"Me? Why?"
"You know precisely what you are doing and you do it well."
"But I don't really do much of anything."
"And of course the quantity means nothing to you, nor the weight others place upon your actions. In my eyes, that makes you a success."
"By not giving a damn? But I do, you know."
"Of course you do, of course you do! But it is a matter of style, an awareness of choice -

But I recall the springtime of the world as though it were yesterday - those days when we rode together to battle, and those nights when we shook the stars loose from the fresh-painted skies!

Once a Buddha, always a Buddha, Sam. Dust off some of your old parables. You have about fifteen minutes.'
Sam held out his hand. Give me some tobacco and a paper.

Wheels turning, the motorcycle's roar grows steady, which, too, is a form of silence.

In a room the size of a ballroom the Pattern was laid. The floor was black and looked smooth as glass. And on the floor was the Pattern.
It shimmered like the cold fire that it was, quivered, made the whole
room seem somehow unsubstantial. It was an elaborate tracery of bright power, composed mainly of curves, though there were a few straight lines near its middle. It reminded me of a fantastically intricate, life-scale version of one of those maze things you do with a pencil (or ballpoint, as the case may be), to get you into or out of something. Like, I could almost see the
words "Start Here," somewhere way to the back. It was perhaps a hundred
yards across at its narrow middle, and maybe a hundred and fifty long.
It made bells ring within my head, and then came the throbbing. My mind recoiled from the touch of it. But if I were a prince of Amber, then somewhere within my blood, my nervous system, my genes, this pattern was recorded somehow, so that I would respond properly, so that I could walk the
bloody thing.

If someone asks you why you're oppressing a world and you reply with a lot of poetic crap, no. I guess there can't be a meeting of minds.

There are stars, stars, scattered stars, blackness all between. They ripple and fold and bend, and they rush toward him, rush by him. Their colors are blazing and pure as angels' eyes.

I would never rest until I held vengeance and the throne within my hand, and good night sweet prince to anybody who stood between me and these things.

Even a mirror will not show you yourself, if you do not wish to see.

Good evening, Lord Corwin,' said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.
Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?'
A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.'
You enjoy this duty?'
He nodded.
I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.

At the end of the season of sorrows comes the time of rejoicing. Spring, like a well-oiled clock, noiselessly indicates this time.

Your woman is gone and your heart is heavy. Words will not lighten the weight, and what is written is written. But let it also be put down that I grieve with you. ~Hasan~

The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.

Wishes, wishes.
Wish in one hand and do something else in the other, and squeeze them both and see which comes true

Excuse me, please. You do not understand. You do not really understand who it was we talked with in the tent that night. He may have seemed an ordinary man to you – a handicapped one, at that. But this is not so. I fear Benedict. He is the Master of Arms for Amber. Can you conceive of a millennium? A thousand years? Several of them? Can you understand a man who, for almost every day of a lifetime like that, has spent some time dwelling with weapons, tactics, strategy? All that there is of military science thunders in his head. He has often journeyed from shadow to shadow, witnessing variation after variation on the same battle, with but slightly altered circumstances, in order to test his theories of warfare. He has commanded armies so vast that you could watch them march by day after day and see no end to the columns. Although he is inconvenienced by the loss of his arm, I would not wish to fight with him either with weapons or barehanded. It is fortunate that he has no designs upon the throne, or he would be occupying it right now. If he were, I believe that I would give up at this moment and pay him homage. I fear Benedict.

The absence of a monument can, in its own way, be something of a monument also.

I worked out a book which I thought was just straight science fiction
with everything pretty much explained, and suddenly I got an idea which I thought was kind of neat for working in a mythological angle. I'm really struggling with myself. It would probably be a better book if I include it, but on the other hand I don't always like to keep reverting to it. I think what I'm going to do is vary my output, do some straight science fiction and some straight fantasy that doesn't involve mythology, and composites.

I have always found that hell is other people.

I have a better idea,' said she. 'Know that under a mortal name am I mistress of the Palace of Kama in Khaipur.'
'The Fornicatorium, madam?'
She frowned. 'As such is it often known to the vulgar, and do not call me 'madam' in the same breath
it smacks of ancient jest. It is a place of rest, pleasure, holiness and much of my revenue.

I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.

If you ever loved anything in your life, try to remember it. If you ever betrayed anything, pretend for a moment that you have been forgiven. If you ever feared anything, pretend for an instant that those days are gone and will never return. Buy the lie and hold to it for as long as you can. Press your familiar, whatever its name, to your breast and stroke it till it purrs.

You leap too quickly to his defense. It reveals his true attitude, of which he has doubtless made you aware.

There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living.

I never plan ahead, with the exception of the Amber books which had to proceed in sequence. But I don't really like to know what I'm going to be working on a year in advance. So I just sign blank contracts for books and whatever strikes me as a good idea is what I write about.

The most difficult thing about Time, I have learned, is doing it.

Once past the comfort zone in either direction, humans soon lost the ability to discriminate bad from worse.

You who are dead ... tonight you will disport yourselves for my pleasure. Food and wine will pass between your dead lips, though you will not taste it. Your dead stomachs will hold it within you, while your dead feet take the measure of a dance. Your dead mouths will speak words that will have no meaning to you, and you will embrace one another without pleasure. You will sing for me if I wish it. You will lie down again when I will it ... Let the revelry begin.

If I get enough letters saying you never explained this or that, I suppose I'll have to write another book.

It is a pain in the ass waiting around for someone to try to kill you.

Beware the meek ... for we shall attempt to inherit the Earth.

It is no shame to lose to me, mortal. Even among mythical creatures there are very few who can give a unicorn a good game.

Even the most heartening of philosophical vistas is no match for, say, a toothache, if it happens to be your own.

Most people who daydream of transforming themselves into some vicious beast and going about tearing people's throats out, dismembering them, disfiguring them and perhaps devouring them tend mainly to dwell upon how much fun it would be and generally neglect the practicalities of the situation.

Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal - the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to routine?

That's life: trust and you're betrayed; don't trust and you betray yourself.

The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.

It was said that Dworkin himself had penned the Book in his saner days, and that long passages had come direct from the Unicorn. I don't know. I wasn't there. It is also said that we are descended of Dworkin and the Unicorn, which gives rise to some unusual mental images.

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.

The minutes dragged by, and a hush fell over the village. This was the time Azzie loved best, the minutes approaching midnight, when the complexition of the world changed, when the sanctities of evening are forgotten, and the saving grace of dawn was still far away. It was in these hours, between midnight and dawn, that evil always felt most at peace with itself, most experimental, most in need of strangeness and sin, most in need of producing the ever-pervading perversions which needed constant renewal, and the doing of which was a delight to the evil soul.

While suggesting you repent, prophets very seldom predict the wrath of the gods in terms of landslides and hurricanes. No. Floods and fires are what you get for the rottenness of your ways. Primitive man was really on his way when he learned to kindle the one and had enough of the other nearby to put it out.

I have no objection to the expression of political opinions in SF if they are an integral part of the story structure. I don't at all appreciate their intrusion for the purpose of converting a story into a political tract, because I consider that intellectually insulting.

Once a Buddha, always a Buddha.

You are of that tribe with your feet in hell and your head in heaven.

Thus did I bear Sir Lancelot de Lac to the Keep of Ganleon, whom I trusted like a brother. That is to say, not at all.

When I said I wanted to die in my sleep, I meant I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.

I feel obligated to point out, though, that I have always been a sucker for ideas I find aesthetically pleasing. The cosmic sweep of the thing - an interstellar kula chain - affirming the differences and at the same time emphasizing the similarities of all the intelligent races in the galaxy - tying them together, building common traditions ... The notion strikes me as kind of fine.

The entire universe is a revelation," said the monk. "All things change, yet all things remain. Day follows night… each day is different, yet each is day. Much of the world is illusion, yet the forms of that illusion follow a pattern which is a part of divine reality.

An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time. One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding.

Before you are fully aware of anything else, you are aware whether you are awakening in your own bed.

I believe everything I say, though I know I'm a liar.

The day of battle dawned pink as the fresh-bitten thigh of a maiden.

I'm a lost soul. We do wail.

Death is mighty, and is no one's friend.

There are none of you, good doctors, could cope with my family anyway.

Between you and me,
the words,
like mortar,
separating, holding together
those pieces of the structure ourselves.
To say them,
to cast their shadows on the page,
is the act of binding mutual passions,
is cognizance, yourself/myself,
of our sameness under skin;
it rears possible cathedrals
indicating infinity with steeply-high styli.
For when tomorrow comes it is today,
and if it is not the drop
that is eternity
glistening at the pen's point,
then the ink of our voices
surrounds like an always night,
and mortar marks the limit of our cells.

Angel of the Forsaken Hope
Wielder of the Sword of Wind and Obsidian
Slice the Algorithms from our Foe.

Mermaid Beneath the Seven Dancing Moons,
Cantress of the Siren Song,
Drown our Enemies in the Data-stream.

Nymph of the Logic Tree,
Child of the First Word,
Give our Antagonist to Grief.

If they come upon one who still has not seen it and they speak to him of fire, he does not know what they mean. So they, in turn, fall back upon telling him what fire is like. As they do so, they know from their own experience that what they are telling him is not the truth, but only a part of it. They know that this man will never know reality from their words, though all the words in the world are theirs to use.

Nothing we did in those days has caused a change." "Because of what we did, things remained as they were, rather than getting worse," I told him.

Death is the only limit to the road you travel.

All roads lead to Amber, he said, as though it were an axiom.

Nick swore he'd die with this boots on, on some exotic safari, but he found his Kilimanjaro in a hospital on Earth, where they'd cured everything that was bothering him, except for the galloping pneumonia he'd picked up in the hospital. That had been, roughly, two hundred and fifty years ago. I'd been a pallbearer.

it is because I am a man who occasionally aspires to things beyond the belly and the phallus.

Of course it does not apply to me. I am the soul of honor, kindness, mercy and goodness. Trust me in all things.

I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.

The death of an illusion tends to disconcert.

The power to hurt ... has evolved in a direct relationship to technological advancement.

There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.