Spider Robinson
American-born Canadian Hugo and Nebula award winning science fiction author.
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.
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?
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.
God is an iron
and that's a hot one.
Nikky has more fiber than I do, I guess: he doesn't let a little thing like death slow him down.
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.
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
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.
As Bob Dylan forgot to say, "To live outside the law, you must be lucky."
To all the Callahan's Places there ever were or ever will be, whatever they may be called and to all the merry maniacs and happy fools who are fortunate enough to stumble into one: may none of them arrive too late!
I smelled her before I saw her. Even so, the first sight was shocking.
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.
Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased thus do we refute entropy.
A man should live forever, or die trying.
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?
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.
It's always coldest before the warm.
Five days of wireheading alone should have killed her, never mind sudden cold turkey.
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 flask, 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.