Top 160 Roger Zelazny Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Can life be counted upon to limit itself? No. It is the mindless striving of two to become infinity. Can death be counted upon to limit itself? Never. It is the equally mindless effort of zero to encompass infinity.”

— Roger Zelazny

102. “It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy – it is a matter of essence. 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.”

— Roger Zelazny

103. “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

104. “Nothing is cheaper than past glories.”

— Roger Zelazny

105. “Yama placed his blade within his sash and withdrew a pipe, which he had purchased at the inn earlier in the day. He filled its bowl with tobacco, lit it, and smoked.”

— Roger Zelazny

106. “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.”

— Roger Zelazny

107. “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

108. “Time means a lot to me, paperwork wastes it, and I have always been a firm believer in my right to do anything I cannot be stopped from doing. Which sometimes entails not getting caught at it. This is not quite so bad as it sounds, as I am a decent, civilized, likable guy. So, shading my eyes against the blue and fiery afternoon, I began searching for ways to convince the authorities of this. Lying, I decided, was probably best.”

— Roger Zelazny

109. “The thing had been quite unpremeditated on my part. I had not even thought of her as a woman until she came into my arms and revised my thinking on the subject.”

— Roger Zelazny

110. “I’m very gullible when it comes to my own words. I believe everything I say, though I know I am a liar.”

— Roger Zelazny

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

— Roger Zelazny

112. “A wave of grayness covered over the monastery. The breeze grew stronger, and the dance of the waters began upon the walls. Like a beaded curtain, the rain covered that open end of the porch at which they stared.”

— Roger Zelazny

113. “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.”

— Roger Zelazny

114. “Let there be an end to thought. Thus do I refute Descartes.′ I sprawled, not a cogito or a sum to my name.”

— Roger Zelazny

115. “The optimism of a revolutionary always gives rise to a sense of wonder.”

— Roger Zelazny

116. “Death is mighty, and is no one’s friend.”

— Roger Zelazny

117. “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

118. “I took Jack his slippers this evening and lay at his feet before a roaring fire while he smoked his pipe, sipped sherry, and read the newspaper. He read aloud everything involving killings, arsons, mutilations, grave robberies, church desecrations, and unusual thefts. It is very pleasant just being domestic sometimes.”

— Roger Zelazny

119. “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.”

— Roger Zelazny

120. “Besides, I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me.”

— Roger Zelazny

121. “Once a Buddha, always a Buddha.”

— Roger Zelazny

122. “Power is like money... You can usually get it if you’re competent and it’s the only thing you want in life.”

— Roger Zelazny

123. “Things pass, but the essence remains. You sit, therefore, in the midst of a dream.”

— Roger Zelazny

124. “Earth is long since dead. On a colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rule their world as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Only one dares oppose them: he who was once Siddhartha and is now Mahasamatman. Binder of Demons, Lord of Light.”

— Roger Zelazny

125. “Much of the world is illusion, yet the forms of that illusion follow a pattern which is a part of divine reality.”

— Roger Zelazny

126. “I? I am nothing,” replied the other. “A leaf caught in a whirlpool, perhaps. A feather in the wind...”

— Roger Zelazny

127. “Each day recapitulates the history of the world, coming up out of darkness and cold into confused light and beginning warmth, consciousness blinking its eyes somewhere in midmorning, awakening thoughts a jumble of illogic and unattached emotion, and all speeding together toward the order of moontide, the slow poignant decline of dusk, the mystical vision of twilight, the end of entropy that is night once more.”

— Roger Zelazny

128. “Man is the sum total of everything he has done, wishes to do or not to do, and wishes he had done, or hadn’t.”

— Roger Zelazny

129. “If he chooses instead the way of the Tantras, combining Samsara and Nirvana, comprehending the world and continuing to live in it, this one is mighty among dreamers.”

— Roger Zelazny

130. “But it is written that it is better to burn one city than to curse the darkness.”

— Roger Zelazny

131. “As there is a time for everything, there is a time also for the end of anything. This is an age for the consolidation of man’s gains upon this world. This is a time for the sharing of knowledge, not the crossing of blades.”

— Roger Zelazny

132. “I collapsed into the chair. I am what might be called a slow starter. I tend to recapitulate phylogeny every morning. Basic desires inched their ways through my gray matter to close a connection. Slowly, I extended a cold-blooded member and clicked my talons against a couple of numbers. I croaked my desire for food and lots of coffee to the voice that responded. Half an hour later I would only have growled. Then I staggered off to the place of flowing waters to renew my contact with basics.”

— Roger Zelazny

133. “I taste the darkness, I hear the song the moon sings.”

— Roger Zelazny

134. “The day was not yet over and it was already my most memorable Walpurgisnacht ever.”

— Roger Zelazny

135. “And the secret is,” I lowered my voice, as at a poetry reading, “he was right! It is vanity, it is pride! It is the hubris of rationalism to always attack the prophet, the mystic, the god. It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us.”

— Roger Zelazny

136. “Moving quickly now, shadow amid shadows. Slipping ghostlike through brush and bramble. My senses extend me beyond my skull. I am become a piece of the night.”

— Roger Zelazny

137. “It’s mainly the little things- all added up- that give us the final picture, that make the difference.”

— Roger Zelazny

138. “The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown.”

— Roger Zelazny

139. “Really. It can’t be as bad as all that,” she said. “Bad? Good and evil are always mixed up. It provides order.”

— Roger Zelazny

140. “I’m all right now,” I said, “but leave me alone. I’m going down to the river to bathe.” I took seven steps, and then someone must have pulled out the plug, because I gurgled, everything swirled, and the world ran away down the drain.”

— Roger Zelazny

141. “It is said that the dead forget the dead in the house of Hades, Cassandra, but I hoped it was not so.”

— Roger Zelazny

142. “Life is sufficiently furnished that one need not go looking about for extra guilt.”

— Roger Zelazny

143. “Does anybody really care about a hungry cat, except for a few friends?”

— Roger Zelazny

144. “Better Queen of the Keep than a coatrack in Amber.”

— Roger Zelazny

145. “Growing moon. Angry cat. Feather on the wind. Autumn comes. The grass dies.”

— Roger Zelazny

146. “So let sleeping wyverns lie.”

— Roger Zelazny

147. “He called the place Amber, and said that it was run by a half-mad family, with the city itself peopled by their bastards and folks whose ancestors they brought in from other places ages ago.”

— Roger Zelazny

148. “Amber has never been noted for its squeamishness,” she said. “You have been exposed to too much American journalism.”

— Roger Zelazny

149. “Never trust a cat, anyway. All they’re good for is stringing tennis racquets.”

— Roger Zelazny

150. “We followed it to the right until it turned left.”

— Roger Zelazny