No, I don’t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression.
Progress means nothing to presence.
You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes – the walls, the walls!
Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.
Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.
The light is the left hand of darkness.
To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.
We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn’t an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.
He is far too intelligent to become really cerebral.
All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.
O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn’t then.
The bond between true lovers is as close as we come to what endures forever.
All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that’s the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it’s life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?
The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one’s true identity in both.
The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.
Go to bed; tired is stupid.