Roger Zelazny citáty

strana 2

„Jen hlupák nemá strach z opravdové síly.“

„Hřbitovy jsou plné lidí, co si mysleli, že je nikdo nemůže nahradit.“

„Vždycky se mi zdálo, že peklo jsou ostatní lidé.“

„…. a kouř bez ohně se najde jen zřídka…..“

„Buď má v sobě element iracionality, nebo je to inteligence takové úrovně, že některé z jeho projevů se nižším bytostem jen jeví jako iracionální.“

„Srdeční záležitosti jsou buď strašně jednoduché, nebo úplně neproniknutelné.“

„Všechny naše speciální síly mají svůj rub. Čím větší síla, tím větší je i cena za ni.“

„Život je plný dveří, které nejdou otevřít, když klepete, a zároveň je tam plno otevřených dveří, o které nestojíte.“

„Člověk je zvíře, které s sebou přináší kulturu.“

„Nebude možné se tomu vyhnout. Taková byla podstata hry, a já si na ni nemohl stěžovat, neboť jsem to byl já, kdo pravidla stanovil.“

„Nejtěžší věcí na čase je vytvořit ho.“

„Nemá žádný význam umět se přenést kamkoliv, když je někdo kretén všude.“

„Vím také, že smrt je jediný bůh, který přijde, když ho voláš.“

„Copak mohu lhát, když se mě nikdo na nic neptá?“

„Musíš se stát něčím větším, než jen sám sebou. Uniknout z klece svého života.“

„Můžete tomu říkat paralelní světy, jest-li chcete, alternativní vesmíry, jest-li se vám to líbí víc, anebo výplody choré mysli, když vám to vyhovuje. Já je nazývám stíny.“

„Někdy i zdání může být skutečnost.“

„Nezáleží na výsledku, ale na snaze.“

„Opřel jsem se o zábradlí a rozhlížel se po tváři země.“

„Vždycky nech spící démony ležet.“

“Strygalldwir is my name. Conjure with it and I will eat your heart and liver."

"Conjure with it? I can't even pronounce it, and my cirrhosis would give you indigestion.”

“I'm a lost soul. Wewail.”

“It is anticipation and recollection that fill the heart—never the sensation of the moment.”

“I'd had a long talk with Bob Silverberg, who was very influential on my early career. He'd, out of the kindness of his heart, at a convention told me that he thought I'd made several mistakes in the way I was disposing of my stories. And I said, "I don't understand what you mean, but I'll be glad to buy you a few drinks, if you'll tell me about it". So we adjourned to the bar and sat there a couple of hours. He was drinking Bloody Marys back then; I was drinking Black Russians. And he told me all sorts of things which carried me over the next several years; it was a lot of information for a couple of drinks. He told me that the first thing I should do if I wanted to write full-time was to get a really good agent. He said that 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.”

“For me, I have seen worlds and people begin and end, actually and metaphorically, and it will always be the same. It’s always fire and water.
No matter what your scientific background, emotionally you’re an alchemist. You live in a world of liquids, solids, gases and heat-transfer effects that accompany their changes of state. These are the things you perceive, the things you feel. Whatever you know about their true natures is rafted on top of that. So, when it comes to the day-to-day sensations of living, from mixing a cup of coffee to flying a kite, you treat with the four ideal elements of the old philosophers: earth, air, fire, water.
Let’s face it, air isn’t very glamorous, no matter how you look at it. I mean, I’d hate to be without it, but it’s invisible and so long as it behaves itself it can be taken for granted and pretty much ignored. Earth? The trouble with earth is that it endures. Solid objects tend to persist with a monotonous regularity.
Not so fire and water, however. They’re formless, colorful, and they’re always doing something. 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. It is coincidence that we’ve filled hells with fires and oceans with monsters? I don’t think so. Both principles are mobile, which is generally a sign of life. Both are mysterious and possess the power to hurt or kill. It is no wonder that intelligent creatures the universe over have reacted to them in a similar fashion. It is the alchemical response.”

“The stars blazed like the love of God, cold and distant.”

“So do not speak to me of souls when you have never seen one, man.”

“It is a city of neat cottages and cobbled streets where wander cats without number, for the enlightened legislators of long ago laid down laws for our protection. A good, kind village, where travelers take their ease and pet the cats, making much of them, which is as it should be.”

“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.”

“I had wanted to go after her, to explain my part in what had happened. But I knew it would do no good, so why lose face? When a fairy tale blows up and the dream dust settles and you find yourself standing there, knowing that the last line will never be written, why not omit any exercises in futility?”

“Dwelling beside a body of water is tonic for the weary psyche. Sea smells, sea birds, seawrack, sands—alternately cool, warm, moist and dry—a taste of brine and the presence of the rocking, slopping bluegraygreen spit-flecked waters, has the effect of rinsing the emotions, bathing the outlook, bleaching the conscience.”

“I was born on the planet Earth, into the middle of the twentieth century, that period in the history of the race when man succeeded in casting off many of the inhibitions and taboos laid upon him by tradition, reveled for a brief time, and then discovered that it didn’t make a bloody bit of difference that he had. He was still just as dead when he died, and he was still faced with every life-death problem that had confronted him before, compounded by the fact that Malthus was right.”

“I see myself as a novelist, period. I mean, the material I work with is what is classified as science fiction and fantasy, and I really don't think about these things when I'm writing. I'm just thinking about telling a story and developing my characters.”

“On the water, aboard the Proteus, the crowding, the activities, the tempo, of life in the cities, on the land, are muted, slowed—fictionalized—by the metaphysical distancing a few meters of water can provide. We alter the landscape with great facility, but the ocean has always seemed unchanged, and I suppose by extension we are infected with some feelings of timelessness whenever we set out upon her.”

“You were both correct,” said Morningstar. “It is the same thing that you both describe, although neither of you sees it as it really is. Each of you colors reality in keeping with your means of controlling it. For if it is uncontrollable, you fear it. Sometimes then, you color it incomprehensible. In your case, a machine; in theirs, a demon.”

“Even if they had been real gods, what did it matter? What was it to me? Here I was still, right where I was born a thousand or so years before, in the middle of the human condition—namely, rubbish and pain. If the gods were real, their only relationship with us was to use us to play their games. Screw them all.”

“I was cruising along on Tokyo Bay, and suddenly this was the answer, looming, the heaped remains of everything that goes down and does not come again to shore, life’s giant kitchen-midden, the rubbish heap that remains after all things pass, the place that stands in testament to the futility of all ideals and intentions, good or bad, the rock that smashes values, there, signalizing the ultimate uselessness of life itself, which must one day be broken upon it, not to rise, no, never, not ever, again.”

“Symbols, by their very nature, conceal as well as indicate, damn them!”

“At one time, tips were given only for things you logically would want to have done efficiently and promptly, and they served to supplement a lower payscale for certain classes of employment. This was understood, accepted. It was tourism, back in the century of my birth, cluing in the underdeveloped countries to the fact that all tourists are marks, that set the precedent, which then spread to all countries, even back to the tourists’ own, of the benefits which might be gained by those who wear uniforms and render the undesired and the unrequested with a smile. This is the army that conquered the world. After their quiet revolution in the twentieth century, we all became tourists the minute we set foot outside our front doors, second-class citizens, to be ruthlessly exploited by the smiling legions who had taken over, slyly, completely.”

“I have noted, too, that when it comes to matters of security the laws are considerably relaxed.”

“All of these things considered, it is not surprising that one can detect echoes, correspondences and even an eternal return or two within the work of a single author. The passage of time does bring changes, yea and alas; but still, I would recognize myself anywhere.”

“Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant — you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.
Trust your demon.”

“I sank Atlantis," he said, "personally. It was about three years ago. And God! it was lovely! It was all ivory towers and golden minarets and silver balconies. There were bridges of opal, and crimson pennants and a milk-white river flowing between lemon-colored banks. There were jade steeples, and trees as old as the world tickling the bellies of clouds, and ships in the great sea-harbor of Xanadu, as delicately constructed as musical instruments, all swaying with the tides. The twelve princes of the realm held court in the dozen-pillared Coliseum of the Zodiac, to listen to a Greek tenor sax play at sunset.”

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

“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."
"I am pleased that you were not wholly bored," Martin said. "Now will you tell me what you were talking about concerning the destruction of my species?”

““Could Yarl the Omnipotent create a stone so heavy he couldn’t lift it?” Green Green asked him.
”No,” said Courtcour.
”Why not?”
”He would not.”
”That is no answer.”
”Yes, it is. Think about it. Would you?””

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

“I’d lived far too long, and with every day that passed the odds kept growing against my lasting much longer. Although they didn’t put it quite that way when giving the sales pitch, my insurance company’s attitude is reflected in the size of the premiums involved.”

“I wasn’t disappointed, inasmuch as I expected nothing.”