9 quotes
Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world.
Roadside Picnic (1972)
A man needs money in order to never think about it…
Roadside Picnic (1972)
That’s the Zone for you: come back with swag, a miracle; come back alive, success; come back with a patrol bullet in your ass, good luck; and everything else—that’s fate.
Roadside Picnic (1972)
And you know, Richard, I’m a physicist and therefore a skeptic.
Roadside Picnic (1972)
Sometimes I ask myself, Why the hell are we always in such a whirl? For the money? But why in the world do we need money, if all we ever do is keep working?
Roadside Picnic (1972)
I wonder why we liked being praised. There’s no money in it. Fame? How famous could we get? He became famous: now he’s known to three.
Roadside Picnic (1972)
“Your question falls under the umbrella of a pseudoscience called xenology. Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption—that an alien race would be psychologically human.”
Roadside Picnic (1972)
In some sense, we’re all cavemen—we can’t imagine anything more frightening than a ghost or a vampire. But the violation of the principle of causality—that’s actually much scarier than a whole herd of ghosts…
Roadside Picnic (1972)
The problem is we don’t notice the years pass, he thought. Screw the years—we don’t notice things change. We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes—or we search for change in all the wrong places.
Roadside Picnic (1972)