13 quotes
Love is always a risk; but hate is a deadly peril.
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)
What is the purpose of being really intelligent if not to have the substance of what you want without mistaking it for the shadow?
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)
Charlie Gleister had invented a time machine, but he hadn’t invented it right because it didn’t work.
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)
Kettelman bristled. Nothing got him angrier than when people implied he was paranoid. It made him feel persecuted.
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)
“But what’s it all for?”
“That’s a stupid question. You might as well ask what reality is for.”
“Well...what is reality for?”
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)
Linguistic accommodation as well. Are they speaking my language or am I speaking theirs? I can never know: the transaction cannot watch itself being transacted.
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)
He exaggerated somewhat. In fact, not one word did he say that was true.
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)
“The disease may not be too difficult to live with.”
“I thought you said it was terminal?”
“So I did. But then, everything is terminal, even health, even life itself. The only question is how long, and in what manner.”
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)
Love, the secret and unofficial heart of pair-bonding behavior, is a force to be reckoned with but never predicted. Love supersedes all other directives and cancels previous obligations. The shared look of love is love’s preview, presenting a foretaste of the joys and sorrows to come, and setting into motion the automatic mating machinery upon which the success and stability of the State depends.
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)
From one viewpoint there were (potentially) a multiplicity of Gleisters; but from another viewpoint there was only one, and he was that one. After all, it didn’t matter what these other people called themselves or where they came from; he was only the person he was here and now, the person whom he experienced. Reality is positional, ego is relational, and nature doesn’t deal in abstractions.
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)
It takes a particular kind of a man to endure the shattering immensities of space and the paranoid-inducing stresses of threats from the unknown. It takes a man with a large and impervious ego and a consistently high degree of aggressive self-confidence. It takes a kind of a nut.
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)
It is all so familiar! I suppose that an electron, traveling from one atom to another, also expects to enter a realm of unimaginable novelty. But perhaps the scenery in every part of the universe is roughly similar; since one sees in accordance with who one is rather than with what is there.
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)
Not only can you not step into the same river twice; it is not even the same you who can’t step into the same river twice. Everything modifies everything. There is no niche in the past waiting for him to come back and occupy it. Nature will tolerate a paradox, but she abhors a vacuum.
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)