32 Quotes by Walter Tevis

They were willing to accept their stringent piety, and silence, and sexual restraints, all unthinkingly, along with a few platitudes about Jesus and Moses and Noah; they were overwhelmed, however, at the effort it would require to understand the literature that was the real source of their religion. I.

In meeting Betty Jo he had learned that there was a large substratum of society that was totally unaffected by this middle-class prototype, that a huge and indifferent mass of persons had virtually no ambitions and no values whatever.

When the bottles hit they tinkled and jangled noisily; but Eddie did not hear them because of the overriding – yet distant, detached, far-off – sound of his own screaming.

Do you realize that you will not only wreck your civilization, such as it is, and kill most of your people; but that you will also poison the fish in your rivers, the squirrels in your trees, the flocks of birds, the soil, the water? There are times when you seem, to us, like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statuary with hammers.

I am human. I talk and I listen and I read.