Robert Silverberg

"Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present."

"I think we made love three times that final summer. Made love! Preposterous euphemism for fucking, almost as bad as the most grotesque of all, slept together. Whatever Sundara and I made, in those three pressings of flesh to flesh, love couldn’t have been the commodity; we made sweat, we made rumpled sheets, we made heavy breathing, we even made orgasms, but love? Love?"

"Am I loyal, or am I loyal? But I don’t like the way things are going. It’s a citizen’s right to worry about the state of the realm, isn’t it? If matters are not to our liking, we should speak up. That’s our tradition, isn’t it? If we allow small abuses now, who knows what sort of things he’ll be doing five years on!"

"“What matters,” he said earnestly, “is the display of skill, not the manners of the audience.”"

"“You speak very generally,” Valentine said. “I am an oracle, and oracles are never terribly specific,” she replied lightly."

"I think power is a sickness and governing is a folly for madmen."

"“Come,” Deliamber said. “There is a vast journey ahead of us.” “I know. That’s why I don’t want to get up.”"

"“But why?” he asked Deliamber. The Vroon replied, “Why? is a useless question in matters of spiritual progress.”"

"“We are not accustomed to threats here,” Lorivade declared. “I make no threat. I speak only of inevitable consequences.”"

"The Barjazid does not yet rule as an absolute tyrant, for that might turn the people against him, and he is still insecure in his power—while you live. But he rules for himself and for his family, not for Majipoor. He lacks a sense of right, and does only what seems useful and expedient. As his confidence grows, so too will his crimes, until Majipoor groans under the whip of a monster."

"They were apt to be disappointed with the way he fulfilled his promises to them, for he intended, if he could, to sweep both the bickering rivals from power. But he did not ask pure and total saintliness of himself in his dealings with those whose chief role in the government appeared to be to impede and obstruct."

"Deliamber shrugged. “Such things are never fairly distributed. What makes you think that only the guilty are punished?” “The Divine—” “Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that’s in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.”"

"How frail, he thought, is the compact that holds our government together! Good will alone is all that sustains it."

"The King is an absolute monarch, and I mean absolute. Whatever he says, goes. There’s no council of nobles, no senate, nothing that remotely challenges the King’s authority. He’s got courtiers and bureaucrats, sure, but the whole empire is essentially his own private property, to rule as he pleases. It sounds like a recipe for disaster. Certainly such an arrangement always has been, in historical times. No empire can hope to have an unbroken string of capable rulers. This king or that one might be all right, and maybe as much as a century can go along without any troublemakers reaching the throne. But sooner or later some madman is bound to come along, a Nero or a Caligula or a Hitler, somebody who won’t be able to handle absolute power, who runs amok and causes terrible chaos."

"He named the names of gods. He named the names of kings—the secret names, the names they had worn as princes, before they became the newest Harinamur. He called upon all the forces of the universe to free himself from— Me."

"There’s no use trying to kid myself with cheery little uplifting cliches. I’ve been forced right up against the underlying truth of things. What a dark and cruel place the world is, for all its beauty, for all its wonder! We have miracles around us on every side—a spiderweb is a miracle, Lora!—but we also have violence, insanity, terrible disease, sudden death. The same Nature that brings us the mountains and the rivers and the green glistening meadows brings us the hurricane, the earthquake, the flood of red-hot lava rolling toward the city."

"I could have given him false consolation then, I suppose. I could have lied, and said that what he had seen was a fever dream, a fantasy, that Athilan would endure forever and a day. But I’m not much good at lying. And I knew that he wasn’t looking for lies from me, or consolations, or anything else that might make him feel good for a moment at the expense of the truth."