Roger Zelazny famous quotes

05-12-2025

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

#Self #People #Different
Even a mirror will not show you yourself, if you do not wish to see.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Mirrors #Wish #Shows
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.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Motivational #Success #Doors
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

#Beautiful #Wise #Wall
The absence of a monument can, in its own way, be something of a monument also.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Way #Absence #Monument
That's life: trust and you're betrayed; don't trust and you betray yourself.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Betrayed #Don't Trust #Betray
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.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Crazy #Stupid #Writing
Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Special #World #Apocalypse
There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Art #Mean #Civilization
The death of an illusion tends to disconcert.
-- Roger Zelazny

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

#Oedipus #Guy #Wish
Between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today.
-- Roger Zelazny

#White #Yesterday #Black
The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Men #Justice #Universe
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.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Lying #Names #Long
I try to sit down at the typewriter four times a day, even if it's only five minutes, and write three sentences.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Writing #Typewriters #Trying
Death and Light are everywhere, always, and they begin, end, strive, attend, into and upon the Dream of the Nameless that is the world, burning words within Samsara, perhaps to create a thing of beauty.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Dream #Light #Burning
There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Goes On #Want #Wanting You
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.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Fall #Car #Survival
The power to hurt ... has evolved in a direct relationship to technological advancement.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Hurt #Advancement #Technological
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.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Followers #Atman #Said
The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Confused #Criticism #Reform
It is anticipation and recollection that fill the heart—never the sensation of the moment.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Heart #Anticipation #Moments
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.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Sea #Smell #Dwelling
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

#Believe #Mirrors #Blood
No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.
-- Roger Zelazny

#Buddhist #Reality #Men

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