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Robert Sheckley war ein US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller. Er gilt als einer der humorvollsten Erzähler der Science-Fiction-Literatur. Wikipedia  

✵ 16. Juli 1928 – 9. Dezember 2005
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Robert Sheckley: Zitate auf Englisch

““You want me to tell you why reality is the way it is,” Seethwright said. “But there is no explanation for that. You must simply learn to fit your preconceptions to what you find. You must not expect reality to adapt itself to you, except very infrequently.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Dimension of Miracles

Quelle: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 21 (p. 133)

“How nicely you put it! We may rant against fortune and the world, but we are left at the end with the stark proposition: “These are the things which are.””

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Robert Sheckley buch Dimension of Miracles

Quelle: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 17 (p. 108)

“A malfunction of this type can be cured only by changing the nature of the universe, which is, of course, impractical.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Dimension of Miracles

Quelle: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 4 (p. 34)

“Blaine remembered how strange, dark, atavistic and noble Hull’s lordly selection of death has seemed. Pretentious, of course; but then, life itself was a pretension in the vast universe of unliving matter.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Immortality, Inc.

Quelle: Immortality, Inc. (1959), Chapter 35 (p. 148)

“The law,” he said, “is above the criminal and the judge, and rules them both. The law is inescapable, for an action is either lawful or unlawful. The law, indeed, may be said to have a life of its own, an existence quite apart from the finite lives of the beings who administer it. The law governs every aspect of human behavior; therefore, to the same extent that humans are lawful beings, the law is human. And being human, the law has its idiosyncrasies, just as a man has his. For a citizen who abides by the law, the law is distant and difficult to find. For those who reject and violate it, the law emerges from its musty sepulchers and goes in search of the transgressor.”

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Robert Sheckley buch The Status Civilization

Quelle: The Status Civilization (1960), Chapter 15 (p. 65)

“Earth, Earth,” the short, alien Carmody mused. “I think I remember the name now. There was a recent study of isolated worlds and the peculiarities of their development. Earth was mentioned as a planet covered with an obsessively overproductive species. Object manipulation is their outstanding modality. Their project is an attempt to live in their own, ever-accumulating waste products. In short, Earth is diseased place. I believe it is being phased out of the Galactic Master Plan on the basis of chronic cosmic incompatibility. The place will then be rehabilitated and turned into a refuge for daffodils.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Dimension of Miracles

Quelle: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 4 (p. 29)

“He distrusted all laws, even the best, while at the same time recognizing the necessity for them. For Joenes, a law took its goodness from the nature of the men who administered it. When the nature of those men changed, as Joenes believed was inevitable, then the nature of the law changed, too. When this happened, new laws and new lawgivers had to be found.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Journey Beyond Tomorrow

Quelle: Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962), Chapter 16 “The End of the Journey” (p. 152)

“His friends, who had been waiting for the death announcement, came to congratulate him. They were eager to hear the complete details of the Trial by Ordeal; but Barrent had learned now that secret knowledge was the road to power. He gave them only the sketchiest outline.”

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Robert Sheckley buch The Status Civilization

Quelle: The Status Civilization (1960), Chapter 11 (p. 52)

“Even rulers, notoriously the slowest of men to change, realized that something had to be done.”

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Robert Sheckley

Quelle: The 10th Victim (1965), Chapter 3 (p. 30)

““Isn’t there anything you can do about the predator?” Carmody asked.
“Nothing. Nor would I if I could. Predation is a necessary circumstance. Even the Gods are eventually eaten by Fate. You will not be an exception to the universal rule.””

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Robert Sheckley buch Dimension of Miracles

Quelle: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 21 (p. 136)

“Remember, the inevitable inefficiency of a huge bureaucracy will be working for you.”

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Robert Sheckley buch The Status Civilization

Quelle: The Status Civilization (1960), Chapter 20 (p. 84)

“My dear Dahl, the first, the primary, task is to bring the earth back into ecological balance. That’s your task, you and the Bahamas Corporation. Ours is to give people something exciting to do other than war while that is going on. Without us and our Hunt, you and your high-minded scientists will just be another group of dreamers living in an imaginary kingdom of sweet reason while the madness of real politics rages all around you. Be practical, Dahl, let’s do something together.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Hunter/Victim

“There is something in what you say,” Dahl admitted. “I’ve been aware for some time of the shortcomings inherent in the sane, dispassionate thinking that we scientists advocate. People don’t pay any attention. Unless there’s an emergency like Love Canal or Chernobyl, the idea of maintaining and upgrading the earth and its ecosystems is not exactly box-office.”
Quelle: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 65 (p. 259)

“We of the Hunt are part of the solution. We offer voluntary murder as a substitute for war. You know that mankind will never be satisfied unless it is killing something. People can’t even properly enjoy a landscape unless there’s something moving across it that can be shot at.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Hunter/Victim

Quelle: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 65 (p. 258)

“Dickerson watched the telephone like a man looking at a sleeping cobra. It could spring into virulent life at any moment, bite him with its hollow fangs, flood his system with the intellectual equivalent of poison, force him to leave the tried-and-true path of safe routine and jump into the dangerous and unpredictable unknown.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Hunter/Victim

Quelle: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 60 (p. 247)

“I beg of you to take this warning seriously, even though these people may be crazies. Since the invention of gunpowder, crazies have been bad news.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Hunter/Victim

Quelle: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 40 (p. 185)

“There was a moist, fertile, decaying sort of odor in the air. Florida was the sort of place that always seemed to be threatening to slip out of time and go back to the Paleozoic where it belonged. The light was a tawny gold filtered through a fragmented wall of green.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Hunter/Victim

Quelle: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 38 (p. 175)

“Outside the curtained windows, Paris stewed in its miasma of self-congratulation and diesel fumes.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Hunter/Victim

Quelle: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 1 (p. 11)

“It was an eccentric sort of event, even for Esmeralda, and needed a special kind of person to volunteer to do it. Luckily, the human race has never thought up anything so ludicrous, dangerous, and frivolous that it won’t attract many willing volunteers.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Victim Prime

Quelle: Victim Prime (1987), Chapter 56 (p. 207)

“I’ve never been able to understand that custom.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Victim Prime

“Not all customs have to have a reason.”

Chapter 20 (p. 88)
Victim Prime (1987)

“Sarah Daubray was opposed to the entire Huntsworld philosophy. She had said on several occasion that only they poor should kill each other, since the wealthy were too valuable to sacrifice. Louvaine, however, was a liberal; he believed anyone had the right to kill anyone else, rich or poor.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Victim Prime

Quelle: Victim Prime (1987), Chapter 20 (p. 86)

“After many centuries we have rediscovered nature’s way of keeping populations in hand. Nature does it the old-fashioned way, by killing people.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Victim Prime

Prologue (p. 8)
Victim Prime (1987)

“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.”

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Robert Sheckley buch Welcome to the Standard Nightmare

Welcome to the Standard Nightmare (p. 88)
Short fiction, 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.”

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Robert Sheckley

Sneak Previews (p. 85)
Short fiction, 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.”

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Robert Sheckley

A Supplicant in Space (p. 60)
Short fiction, 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.”

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Robert Sheckley

Slaves of Time (p. 19)
Short fiction, 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.”

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Robert Sheckley

Slaves of Time (p. 18)
Short fiction, 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.”

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Robert Sheckley

Slaves of Time (p. 16)
Short fiction, 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.”

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Robert Sheckley

Slaves of Time (p. 16)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

“Nothing happens for the first time, especially if what you’re trying to do is to invent something absolutely novel and unprecedented. Of course, if nothing happens for the first time, that leaves the apparent problem of how anything happens at all. But the difficulty is entirely semantic: in the eternal recurrence of subatomic configurations of which our world is a simulacrum, there is no question of beginnings or endings. There are only middles, continuations, repetitions. Originality is a concept possible only to a limited viewpoint.”

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Robert Sheckley

Slaves of Time (pp. 14-15)
Short fiction, 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.”

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Robert Sheckley

Slaves of Time (p. 11)
Short fiction, The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)

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