We cannot change what has happened. We go on from where we stand. Not even Necessity knows all ends.
One thing I have learned about grief,” I said to her, “is that nothing anyone says to you is useful, but it can still be comforting sometimes to know you’re not alone.
I hate those Socratic dialogues where everything gets drawn out at the pace of an excessively logical snail.
James Davis Nicoll, on the 1962 nominees: “Terry Pratchett has his own sword forged by his own hands from meteoric iron, which must be of considerable utility when negotiating contracts.
What I mean is, when I look at other people, other girls in school, and see what they like and what they’re happy with and what they want, I don’t feel as if I’m a part of their species. And sometimes – sometimes I don’t care.
That everyone is of equal significance and that the differences between individuals are more important than the differences between broad classes?
Consider Augustus’s motto. Hurry more slowly.
You know what I’d love to read? A Dialogue between Bron and Shevek and Socrates. Socrates would love it too. I bet he wanted people who argued. You can tell he did, you can tell that’s what he loved really, at least in The Symposium.
She turned into a tree. It was a Mystery. It must have been. Nothing else made sense, because I didn’t understand it.
And what he had offered me was exactly everything I most wanted – to make art, to build the future, to help each other become our best selves. “He honors me.
Everyone had their own internal life and their own soul, and they were entitled to make their own choices.
There is no perfection in human things, only in the world of Forms.
They could take the money from building enough nukes to kill all the Russians in the world and give it to libraries. What good does an independent nuclear deterrent do Britain, compared to the good of libraries?
I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he’s snoozeworthy at the best of times.
Left to themselves, people remake their origin stories every few generations to suit present circumstances.
I read in hopes of little sparkling moments that are going to turn my head inside out.
What made him imagine he could have a dialogue with them?” “He’s Sokrates,” I said. “He’s like a two-year-old sticking pencils in his ear,” she said.
This novel is for everyone who has ever studied any monstrosity of history, with the serene satisfaction of being horrified while knowing exactly what was going to happen, rather like studying a dragon anatomized upon a table, and then turning around to find the dragon’s present-day relations standing close by, alive and ready to bite.
The Republic isn’t as much fun as The Symposium. It’s all long speeches, and nobody bursting in drunk to woo Socrates in the middle.
Certainty closes many doors,” he replied. “It leads to dogmatism. Souls accept what they know and stop striving upwards.