Life & Wisdom Quote by Roger Zelazny

A line like this is engineered to detonate in your mouth: pleasure on one side, family sentiment on the other, and the fuse is the deadpan “constantly.” Zelazny, a writer who loved mythic frames and genre-bending misdirection, pairs two human urges we’re trained to keep in separate rooms: appetite and affection. The result is comedy with teeth. You laugh, then immediately wonder what kind of person would speak this way, which is exactly the point.

“Slaughtering beasts” is deliberately archaic and theatrical. It’s not “hunting,” with its wholesome camo-and-cooler associations, and it’s not “killing,” which would force a moral accounting. “Slaughtering” invokes ritual, butchery, even heroics, as if the speaker is auditioning for epic status while confessing something faintly shameful. Then comes the kicker: “my relatives.” Not “my loved ones,” not “my family,” but the colder, bureaucratic word that makes kinship sound like an inconvenient census category. Constantly thinking of them starts to feel less like tenderness and more like obsession, guilt, or a predator’s inventory.

The subtext reads like a portrait of compartmentalization: the mind that can romanticize violence and, in the same breath, perform domestic decency. It’s also a sly nudge at how easily civilization coexists with brutality, especially when language is doing the laundering. Zelazny doesn’t ask you to choose between disgust and recognition; he makes you experience both at once, which is why the sentence sticks like a burr.