Roger Zelazny Quotes

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.

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

Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.

The death of an illusion tends to disconcert.

When inspiration is silent reason tires quickly.

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

If a building is falling on you, you don't concern yourself with the horn of an approaching car. You deal with the most immediate peril first. That's survival.

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

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

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

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.

I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.

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

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

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

The enemy of the moment is not as important as our own inner weakness. If this is not mended we are already defeated, though no foreign conqueror stands within our walls.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

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'm a lost soul. We do wail.

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

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

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

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

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

I tried a very fancy attack I'd learned in France, which involved a beat, a feint in quarte, a feint in sixte, and a lunge veering off into an attack on his wrist. I nicked him, and the blood flowed.

While I had often said that I wanted to die in bed, what I really meant was that in my old age I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.

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

When your bow is broken and your last arrow spent, then shoot, shoot with your whole heart.

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

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.

Two days like icebergs bleak, blank, half-melting, all frigid, mainly out of sight, and definitely a threat to peace of mind drifted by and were good to put behind.

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

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

Nobody steals books but your friends.

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.

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.

I've always been impulsive. My thinking is usually pretty good, but I always seem to do it after I do my talking — by which time I've generally destroyed all basis for further conversation.

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

Sleep is perhaps the only among life's great pleasures which need not be of short duration.

Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?" "Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.

When you are about to die, a wombat is better than no company at all.

I enjoy slaughtering beasts, and I think of my relatives constantly.

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

If the liberal arts do nothing else they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.

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.

You are a fool to speak of last great battles...for the last great battle is always the next one.

To waste! You are unknown and unwanted, save by me. This, because you are fairly adept at the various embalming arts and you occasionally compose a clever epitaph.

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

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

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.