Spider Robinson Quotes
Spider Robinson mixes playful humor with thoughtful ideas about connection and chaos.
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Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased - thus do we refute entropy.
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Just as there are Laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed. But one can be converted into the other.
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In a culture where pessimism has metastasized like slow carcinoma, that crazy Irishman was backward enough to try to raise hopes, like hothouse flowers. In an era during which even judicious use of alcohol has been increasingly bad-rapped, the man who came to be known as The Mick of Time was backward enough to think that the world can look just that essential tad better when seen through a flase, brightly. (As Long as you let someone else drive you home afterward.) Above all, he - and his goofball customers - believed that shared pain is lessened, and shared Joy increased. Now he is gone. Gone back whence he came, and we are all the poorer for it. But I refuse to say that we will not see his like again. Or his love again.
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To all the Calahan's Places there ever were or ever will be, whatever they may be called - ant to all the merry maniacs and happy fools who are fortunate enough to stumble into one: may none of them arrive too late!
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The delusion that one's sexual pattern is The Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim's fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observing reality.
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I smelled her before I saw her. Even so, the first sight was shocking.
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I had just seen the two most horrible things. The first was the smile. They say that when the bomb went off at Hiroshima, some people's shadows were baked onto walls by it. I think that smile got baked on the surface of my brain in much the same way. I don't want to talk about that smile.
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Five days of wireheading alone should have killed her, never mind sudden cold turkey.
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Animated the face might have been beautiful - any set of features can support beauty - but even a superb makeup job could not have made her pretty.
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I was putting together a picture of a life that would have depressed anyone with the sensitivity of a rhino. Back when I had first seen her, when her features were alive, she had looked sensitive. Or had that been a trick of the juice?
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I wanted to understand.
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I've tried it with men and women and boys and girls, in the dark and in the desert sun, with people I cared for and people I didn't give a damn about, and I have never understood the pleasure in it. The best it's ever been for me is not uncomfortable.
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'God is an iron,' I said. 'Did you know that?' I turned to look at her and she was staring. She laughed experimentally, stopped when I failed to join in. 'And I'm a pair of pants with a hole scorched through the ass?' 'If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.'
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Man has historically devoted much more subtle and ingenious thought to inflicting cruelty than to giving others pleasure - which, given his gregarious nature, would seem a much more survival-oriented behavior. Poll any hundred people at random and you'll find at least twenty or thirty who know all there is to know about psychological torture and psychic castration - and maybe two who know how to give a terrific back-rub.
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Call it: joy. The thing like pleasure that you feel when you've done a good thing or passed up a real tempting chance to do a bad thing. Or when the unfolding of the universe just seems especially apt. It's nowhere near as flashy and intense as pleasure can be. Believe me! But it's got something going for it. Something that can make you do without pleasure, or even accept a lot of pain, to get it.
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'It took a couple of hundred million years to develop a thinking ape and you want a smart one in a lousy few hundred thousand? That lemming drive you're talking about is there - but there's another kind of drive, another kind of force that's working a against it. Or else there wouldn't still be any people and there wouldn't be the words to have this conversation and-' She paused, looked down at herself. 'And I wouldn't be here to say them.'
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Now I can say that I have sampled the spectrum of the pleasure system at both ends - none and all there is - and I think the rest of my life I will dedicate myself to the middle of the road and see how that works out. Starting with the very weak tea and toast I'm going to ask you to bring me in another ten minutes or so. With maltose. But as for this other stuff, this joy thing, that I would like to begin learning about, as much as I can. I don't really know a God damned thing about it, but I understand it has something to do with sharing and caring and what did you say your name was?
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God is an iron: and that's a hot one.
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It's always coldest before the warm.
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As Bob Dylan forgot to say, 'To live outside the law, you must be lucky.'
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Nikky has more fiber than I do, I guess: he doesn't let a little thing like death slow him down.
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A person should live forever, or die trying.
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I don't know how that 'Paul' rumour got started, but I've been correcting it for thirty years, and nobody seems to pay the slightest bit of attention to me. Maybe I'll give up and LET them mistake me for someone else, since they're so determined. If there is a Paul, maybe I can get him to pay my taxes for me. Or better yet, write the damn books:
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And I repeat: if there is anything that can divert the land of my birth from its current stampede into the Stone Age, it is the widespread dissemination of the thoughts and perceptions that Robert Heinlein has been selling as entertainment since 1939.
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…when writing, always hook the reader with your first sentence…in love, never settle…value yourself first and this will help you to value others…life is short, so enjoy it to the fullest…everyone in the world is different, and that’s ok…
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If you've lived a bad life, they send you to Hell. But if you've been truly wicked, they give you a tour of Heaven first...
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The whole world turns upside down in ten years, but you turn upside down with it.
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She danced because she needed to. She needed to say things which could be said in no other way, and she needed to take her meaning and her living from the saying of them.
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Sometimes I think I must have a Guardian Idiot. A little invisible spirit just behind my shoulder, looking out for me...only he's an imbecile.
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The problems of today's youth were no longer a Sunday supplement, or a news broadcast, or anything so remote and intangible. They were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy, who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our blood, he was not only tired of living, but so unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes for recreation.
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Now that I finally have the time for it, this web surfing stuff turns out to be as interesting and fun and addictive as you've all been telling me. Zipping from link to link, chasing an idea across the noosphere, sucking up information like a killer whale - way cool.
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Librarians are like crack dealers when it comes to hooking small children.
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We did make use, from time to time, of candles, neckties, scarves, shoelaces, a little water-color paintbrush, her hairbrush, butter, whipped cream, strawberry jam, Johnson’s Baby Oil, my Swedish hand vibrator, a fascinating bead necklace she had, miscellaneous common household items, and every molecule of flesh that was exposed to air or could be located with strenuous search.
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This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving -- and to act, to strive. This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp. This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying. This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered. This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the certainty of failure. This is what it is to be human: to persist.
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Never attribute to malice, that which can be reasonably explained by stupidity.
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Quite frankly, I don't like you humans. After what you all have done, I find being 'inhuman' a compliment.
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Man, you're no smarter than me. You're just a fancier kind of stupid.
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there's nothing in the human heart or mind, no place no matter how twisted or secret, that can't be endured - if you have someone to share it with.
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Shared joy is increased, shared pain is lessened.
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Dreams should be forgotten when we wake. Or one day we will find ourselves unable to sleep.
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In 1971, after seven years in college, with that magic piece of paper clutched triumphantly in my fist, the best job I was able to get was night watchman on a sewer project in Babylon, N.Y. guarding a hole in the ground to prevent anyone from stealing it. God bless the American educational system!