There are very few starts. Oh, some things seem to be beginnings. The curtain goes up, the first pawn moves, the first shot is fired — but that's not the start. The play, the game, the war is just a...

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.

To bask in the present, care nothing about the future, and forget the past.

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.

Are you surprised by anything anymore?

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

It's a rare person to face who they truly are and not run from it -- not be broken by it. That's what the Ouroboros shows all who look into it: who they are, every despicable and unholy inch. Some...

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

I wonder if men find it easier than women do to consider people not as bodies, as lives, but as numbers, figures, toys of the mind to be pushed about a battleground of the mind. This disembodiment...

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.

Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step...

"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.

Everything done, even the most innocent in appearance, is already guilty, already corrupted; it is thrown into the unclean flow of formation and can never swim back against the current again.

Instead, I would raise my altar with the image of Beatrice; and, by consecrating myself to her, I would consecrate myself to the world of spirit and to the gods. The part of life I took from the...

About that, little Lena, all wise and holy people have broken their heads over it. There is no happiness that lasts.

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

What happens in me during rare moments of joy, which for me is pleasure, experience, ecstasy, and exaltation, the world perhaps only seeks in poetic works, and in life considers madness. And indeed,...

It tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.