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Roger Zelazny Quotes | Quotes said by Roger Zelazny

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #1

    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.


  • Roger Zelazny Quote #2

    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.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #3

    Besides, I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #4

    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!

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #5

    Collins and Morales represent a segment of society which, if attacked with the weapons society sanctions, one finds buffered by innumerable layers of law, bureaucracy, lies, evasions. They rest secure within their palaces, confident that they possess defenses against all possible attacks within the rules of the game, yet willing to violate those rules themselves. ... We both know that although it is not listed in the rules, a player can end the game by kicking over the board and throttling his opponent.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #6

    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?

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #7

    Do you work for the government, any government?”
    I pay taxes, which means I work for the government, part of the time. Yes.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #8

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

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #9

    First, a man may in some ways be superior to his fellows and still serve them, if together they serve a common cause which is greater than any one man. I believe that I serve such a cause, or I would not be doing it.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #10

    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.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #11

    Good-bye and hello, as always.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #12

    He continued to move forward, skirting a pocket of radiation that had not died in the four years since last he had come this way.
    They came upon a place where the sands were fused into a glassy sea, and he slowed as he began its passage, peering ahead after the craters and chasms it contained.
    Three more rockfalls assailed him before the heavens split themselves open and revealed a bright-blue light, edged with violet. The dark curtains rolled back toward the Poles, and the roaring and the gunfire reports diminished. A lavender glow remained in the north, and a green sun dipped toward the horizon at his back.
    They had ridden it out, and he killed the infras, pushed back his goggles, and switched on the normal night lamps.
    The desert would be bad enough, all by itself.
    Something big and batlike swooped through the tunnel of his lights and was gone. He ignored its passage. Five minutes later it made a second pass, this time much closer, and he fired a magnesium flare. A black shape, perhaps forty feet across, was illuminated, and he gave it two five-second bursts from the fifty-calibers, and it fell to the ground and did not return again.
    To the squares, this was Damnation Alley. To Hell Tanner, this was still the parking lot.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #13

    He smelled the smells of commerce and listened to the cursing of the sailors, both of which he admired: the former, as it reeked of wealth, and the latter because it combined his two other chief preoccupations, these being theology and anatomy.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #14

    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.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #15

    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.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #16

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

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #17

    I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadows.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #18

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

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #19

    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.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #20

    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.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #21

    I'm very gullible when it comes to my own words. I believe everything I say, though I know I'm a liar.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #22

    If it will give you any satisfaction in the end, I still care for you. Either there is no such thing as love, or the word does not mean what I have thought it to mean on many different occasions. It is a feeling without a name, really—better to leave it at that. So take it and go away and have your fun with it. You know that we would both be at one another's throats again one day, as soon as we run out of common enemies. We had many fine reconciliations, but were they ever worth the pain that preceded them? Know that you have won and that you are the goddess I worship—for are not worship and religious awe a combination of love and hate, desire and fear?

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #23

    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.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #24

    In the mirrors of the many judgments, my hands are the color of blood. I sometimes fancy myself an evil which exists to oppose other evils; and on that great Day of which the prophets speak but in which they do not truly believe, on the day the world is utterly cleansed of evil, then I too will go down into darkness, swallowing curses. Until then, I will not wash my hands nor let them hang useless.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #25

    In the State of Denmark there was the odor of decay...

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #26

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

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #27

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

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #28

    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 saw it raised against me I was overwhelmed with a sense of my own mortality, which I had never experienced before in this fashion. It was as though a layer had been stripped from the world and I had a sudden, full understanding of death itself.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #29

    It was my turn to be silent while a small family of moments crossed my path, single file, from the left, sticking their tongues out at me.

  • Roger Zelazny Quote #30

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

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