Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end.
To be alive was to be disappointed. You tried and failed and kept on trying, never knowing whether you’d ever get what you wanted. But sometimes we get what we need.
For every path you choose, there is another you must abandon, usually forever.
Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear.
These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual.
Myth is, after all, the neverending story.
Theres no such thing as a free lunch, at least on the karmic level.
The futures and ultimate fates of the characters in The Snow Queen are profoundly changed by choices made in their own minds or hearts, as well as choices unexpectedly forced on them by things beyond their control.
Archaeology is the anthropology of the past, and science fiction is the anthropology of the future.
Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.
And so The Snow Queen also became a story about the need to seek equilibrium, in our own lives, with the natural world, even within the universe at large.
Studying anthropology, I developed a kind of holistic view of human existence, in which the dichotomies you listed are all necessary and vital aspects of life.
Perhaps the thing that makes humans truly unique on Earth is that we are never satisfied with our situation; maybe that is what’s taken us so far.
What does immortality mean to me? That we all want more time; and we want it to be quality time.
I stood where they’d left me. I watched them get smaller and smaller as they went down the hallway, leaving me there without a word, not even looking back. Only I was getting smaller and smaller, being swallowed up in the suffocating emptiness of the silent house; so that by the time they came back again, I would have disappeared.
Most people simply aren’t unhappy enough with the known to trade it for the unknown.
How time slips past, masked in the rhythm of the days!
Laws were made by men, and men made mistakes.
There were some things even the rules of an absolute human overlord had no right to deny, and one of them was justice.
Jule was a poet – poetry was like psi, she said, like thought, a thing that compressed images to essence.
Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don’t stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn’t act, it allows. And that’s what gives it so much power.” He.