Your story does not live in your soul, only in your mind.

Divine Dichotomy holds that it is possible for two apparently contradictory truths to exist simultaneously in the same space. Now on your planet people find this difficult to accept. They like to have...

It was not how one lived, but how one chose to die.

The colour of the magpie, her father was saying, was symbolic of creation. The void, the mystery of that which had not yet taken form. Black and white, he said. Presence and absence.

The researcher's gaze often found more than he wished to find.

According to our Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, people do not write well when they are happy. If you are content with life, you simply want to enjoy it.

Love is a one-way street. Love, like respect isn't something you get; it's something you give

Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts. Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and...

He was a man who knew there were such things as jokes in the world or people would not write about them, but had never actually been introduced to one or shaken its hand.

Death is the mother of beauty.

There are some laws that are coded into the very nature of the universe, and one is: There Is Never Enough Shelf Space.

The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.

No clowns were funny. That was the whole purpose of a clown. People laughed at clowns, but only out of nervousness. The point of clowns was that, after watching them, anything else that happened...

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

Discipline was necessary, but unquestioning obedience was a limiting thing, not a growing one.

Emotion clouds the rational, and many perspectives guide the full reality. To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy. It is to know the past...

You can't regulate integrity

We reach with our hands and brush away the clouds and pierce the sky to reach the moon and Mars but we still can't reach the truth

Interruptions were sometimes more frequent than statements. The process, compared to a well-managed executive conference, was a slab of raw beef compared to a wiring diagram. Raw beef, however,...

The doctor was not, he thought, really sure that anyone else existed, and wanted to prove they did by helping them.

"I saw that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't save each other. Or ourselves." "What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You're denying brotherhood, Shevek!" the tall girl cried....

Love that wants only to get, to possess, is a monstrous thing

Youth is a deception - a deception of the press and textbooks. The best time of life! {...} Youth is the most difficult time of existence.

Death is neither there nor here, it rises on every path. It is in you and in me as soon as we betray life

Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up...

how easy human frailties could thrive under the cover of idealism

Narziss was dark and thin of face, and Goldmund open and radiant as a flower. Narziss was a thinker and anatomiser, Goldmund a dreamer and a child. Yet things common to both could bridge these...

In fact, at times I preferred to live in the forbidden world, and frequently my return home to the bright realm, no matter how necessary and good that might be, was almost like a return to someplace...

He brooded on how close destruction always was to all creatures, animals as well as humans, and he realized that there is nothing we can predict or know for certain in this world except death.

One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.