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...

That was with me for years - feeling I wasn't myself. And I do think I wasn't my real self then. Of course, I'm not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could ransack your innards looking...

You can go to war with the world, but the world will always win

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.

A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true

Reason is always apparent to a discerning eye. But luck? It's invisible, erratic, angelic.

Death is the mother of beauty.

Destiny was funny stuff, he knew. You couldn't trust it. Often you couldn't even see it. Just when you knew you had it cornered, it turned out to be something else - coincidence, maybe, or providence....

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.

Meddlers, both, we be, and always with the hope that our meddling will leave in our wake a more beautiful tapestry than that we first encountered.

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

In the dim light of Twinkle's glow, their skin colors lost in a common gray, they seemed alike, brethren come from the same mold. Entreri approved of that perception, but Drizzt surely did not.

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

By the grace of this forgetting, we temporarily shelve our inherited ways of looking and see things as if for the first time

power in and of itself is neither worthy of respect nor fear; it simply is. It is how power is employed, and towards what ends, that ennobles or denigrates the wielder of power.

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

A lovely girl gazing at the stars, and the stars who gazed back.

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