Quotes from This Immortal

Roger Zelazny ·  216 pages

Rating: (8.6K votes)


“There's really nothing quite like someone's wanting you dead to make you want to go on living.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from This Immortal


“Love is a negative form of hatred.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from This Immortal


“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, quote from This Immortal


“The death of an illusion tends to disconcert.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from This Immortal


“P.S. I still dunno if it's art. Go to Hell yourself. ”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from This Immortal



“Your woman is gone and your heart is heavy. Words will not lighten the weight, and what is written is written. But let it also be put down that I grieve with you. ~Hasan~”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from This Immortal


“He spent the last second of his life screaming, as the force of Bortan's leap pulped him against the ground, before his head was snatched from his shoulders.
My hellhound had arrived.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from This Immortal


“Nothing is cheaper than past glories.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from This Immortal


“Far below, the ocean was a bluegray rug being pulled out from beneath us.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from This Immortal


“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, quote from This Immortal



“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, quote from This Immortal


“I’ve always been impulsive. My thinking is usually pretty good, but I always seem to do it after I do my talking—by”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from This Immortal


“we avoided their swarms by putting one foot in front of another without pause and making noises of our own. We didn’t step on anybody who squashed.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from This Immortal


“Dress Blacks mag-bind down the sides, leaving a smooth front whereon is displayed a green-blue-gray-white Earth insignia, about three inches in diameter, high up on the left breast; below, the symbol for one’s department is worn, followed by the rank-sigil; on the right side goes every blessed bit of chicken manure that can be dreamt up to fake dignity—this, by the highly imaginative Office of Awards, Furbishments, Insig-niae, Symbols and Heraldry (OAFISH, for short—its first Director appreciated his position).”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from This Immortal


“As for the rest of him, his function is rather like that of an anti-computer: you feed him all kinds of carefully garnered facts, figures, and statistics and he translates them into garbage.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from This Immortal



“So feathers or lead?” I asked him. “Pardon?” “It is the riddle of the kallikanzaros. Pick one.” “Feathers?” “You’re wrong.” “If I had said lead’ . . .?” “Uh-uh. You only have one chance. The correct answer is whatever the kallikanzaros wants it to be. You lose.” “That sounds a bit arbitrary.” “Kallikanzaroi are that way. It’s Greek, rather than Oriental subtlety. Less inscrutable, too. Because your life often depends on the answer, and the kallikanzaros generally wants you to lose.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from This Immortal


“And then the night wind, cool through arches of the years, came hounding after me.”
― Roger Zelazny, quote from This Immortal


About the author

Roger Zelazny
Born place: in Euclid, Ohio, The United States
Born date May 13, 1937
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Popular quotes

“His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they were--about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt" and such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, quote from Treasure Island


“I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from A Farewell to Arms


“If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.”
― John Irving, quote from The World According to Garp


“Reluctantly Bastian's thoughts turned back to reality. He was glad the Neverending Story had nothing to do with that.
He didn't like books in which dull, cranky writers describe humdrum events in the very humdrum lives of humdrum people. Reality gave him enough of that kind of thing, why should he read about it? Besides, he couldn't stand it when a writer tried to convince him of something. And these humdrum books, it seemed to him, were always trying to do just that.
Bastian liked books that were exciting or funny, or that made him dream. Books where made-up characters had marvelous adventures, books that made him imagine all sorts of things.
Because one thing he was good at, possibly the only thing, was imagining things so clearly that he almost saw and heard them.”
― Michael Ende, quote from The Neverending Story


“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from David Copperfield


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