Literary Birthday – 15 January – Robert Silverberg

Happy Birthday, Robert Silverberg, born 15 January 1935.

Seven Quotes

1. Utopias are boring. Dystopias on the other hand, are interesting.
2. Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.
3. She loaned him books. Worlds were revealed to him: worlds piled on worlds, worlds without end.
4. What is history, other than a matter of choice, the picking and choosing of certain facts out of a multitude to elicit a meaningful pattern, which was not necessarily the true one? The act of selecting facts, by definition, inherently involved discarding facts as well, often the ones most inconvenient to the pattern that the historian was trying to reveal. Truth thus became an abstract concept: three different historians, working with the same set of data, might easily come up with three different ‘truths’.
5. It is my craft and my science to Watch. It is yours to jeer. Each of us to our speciality.
6. Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing’s unthinkable once somebody’s thought it.
7. But powers decay. Time leaches the colours from the best of visions. The world becomes greyer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.

Robert Silverberg is an American author and editor, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, and a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. He is the author of Dying Inside, Downward to the Earth, Lord Valentine’s Castle, and At Winter’s End.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson

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