"Who would bring light must endure burning."
— David Zindell (The Wild)

"We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy one means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget."
— G.K. Chesterton

"I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashined storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.
(...) I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, with such abominable results: they wre doing their best to live like people invented in story books. this was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for edning short stories and books.
Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
And so on.
Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhapy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. ever person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.
If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)

"Why must we love where the lightning strikes, and not where we choose? "
— Theodore Sturgeon (E Pluribus Unicorn)

"Cynicism is what passes for insight when courage is lacking"
— Anita Roddick

"To a thoughtful biographer, [Ebling Mis's house] was "the symbolization of a retreat from a non-academic reality", a society columnist gushed silkily at its "frightfully masculine atmosphere of careless disorder", a University Ph.D called it brusquely, "bookish, but unorganized", a non-university friend said, "good for a drink anytime and you can put your feet on the sofa", and a breezy newsweekly broadcast, that went in for color, spoke of the "rooky, down-to-earth, no-nonsense living quarters of blaspheming, Leftish, balding Ebling Mis".

To Bayta, who thought of no audience but herself at the moment, and who had the advantage of first-hand information, it was merely sloppy."
— Isaac Asimov (Foundation and Empire)

"Anger can be borne - it can even be satisfying - if it can gather into words and explode in a storm, or a rapier-sharp attack. But without these means of ventilation, it only turns back inward, building and swirling like a head of stream - building to an impotent, murderous rage."
— Eva Hoffman (Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language)

"If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't."
— Lyall Watson

"... criticism - however valid or intellectually engaging - tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require _practice_, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off)."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien)

"We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are."
— The Talmud

"Everyone has the right to doubt everything as often as he pleases and the duty to do it at least once. No way of looking at things is too sacred to be reconsidered. No way of doing things is beyond improvement."
— Edward De Bono (The Use of Lateral Thinking)

"Democracy is an excellent way of ensuring that nothing much gets done. There are always interests that might get trampled upon [and no elected politician would wish to make permanent enemies by trampling upon others' interests]."
— Edward De Bono (I Am Right You Are Wrong: From This to the New Renaissance: From Rock Logic to Water Logic)

"A billion and a half human souls, who had been given the techniques of music and the graphic arts, and the theory of technology, now had the others: philosophy and logic and love; sympathy, empathy, forbearance, unity, in the idea of their species rather than in their obedience; membership in harmony with all life everywhere.
A people with such feelings and their derived skills cannot be slaves. As the light burst upon them, there was only one concentration possible to each of them—to be free, and the accomplished feeling of being free. As each found it, he was an expert in freedom, and expert succeeded expert, transcended expert, until (in a moment) a billion and a half human souls had no greater skill than the talent of freedom."
— Theodore Sturgeon

"It's not enough to look for the truth, however a noble journey that might be. [...] You must be able to say "yes" to what you see. [...] He is the yeasayer who could look upon evil, disease and suffering, all the worst incarnations of the Eternal No, and not fall insane. He is the great-souled one who can affirm the truth of the Universe."
— David Zindell (The Broken God)

"A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live."
— Laozi

"Reality [...] at every level from photons to philosophical fancies to the consciousness of living organisms was fluid [...]. To break apart and confine this reality into separate categories created by the mind was foolish and futile, much like trying to capture a ray of light inside a dark wooden box. This urge to categorize was the true fall of man [...] the infinite became finite, good opposed evil, thoughts hardened into beliefs, one's joys and discoveries became dreadful certainties, man became alienated from what he perceived as other ways and other things, and, ultimately, divided against himself, body and soul. [...] Always seeking meaning, always making their lives safe and comfortable, human beings do not truly live."
— David Zindell (The Broken God)

""If you kill me, you kill yourself."
[...]
He only wanted to convey to Janegg the truth of ahimsa, which is that all beings were connected to each other in the deepest way and thus it was impossible to harm another without harming oneself."
— David Zindell (The Wild)

"Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back."
— Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn)

"On bad days I talk to Death constantly, not about suicide because honestly that's not dramatic enough. Most of us love the stage and suicide is definitely your last performance and being addicted to the stage, suicide was never an option - plus people get to look you over and stare at your fatty bits and you can't cross your legs to give that flattering thigh angle and that's depressing. So we talk. She says things no one else seems to come up with, like let's have a hotdog and then it's like nothing's impossible.
She told me once there is a part of her in everyone, though Neil believes I'm more Delirium than Tori, and Death taught me to accept that, you know, wear your butterflies with pride. And when I do accept that, I know Death is somewhere inside of me. She was the kind of girl all the girls wanted to be, I believe, because of her acceptance of "what is." She keeps reminding me there is change in the "what is" but change cannot be made till you accept the "what is.""
— Tori Amos

"You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul."
— George Bernard Shaw

"... as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out [...] the literary novel has become extraordinarily privatistic of late. It's as if the big issues (Does God exist? from whence springs decency? what sort of species is Homo Sapiens?) were either settled or not worth discusssing, and serious writers should therefore confine themselves to their various ethnic heritages and interpersonal relationships."
— James Morrow (Nebula Awards 27)

"Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
— Oscar Wilde

"The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situations. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help is, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited)

"It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind."
— Samuel R. Delany (Equinox)

"You know what truth is? [...] It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, "Yeah, yeah - ain't it the truth?"
— Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions)

"Beliefs are the eyelids of the mind."
— David Zindell (The Broken God)

"[...] when you look at the world, you put on the goggles of custom, habit and tribal wisdom lest the truth make you insane [...] you see the world reflected in your own image; you see yourself reflected to the image of the world (...)"
— David Zindell (The Broken God)

"If people were in the habit of refering to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang,' it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien)

"We walk the brink of racial suicide because we were smart enough to make atomic bombs and stupid enough to use them."
— David Zindell (Neverness)

"The system will always be defended by those countless people who have enough intellect to defend but not quite enough to innovate."
— Edward De Bono (I Am Right You Are Wrong: From This to the New Renaissance: From Rock Logic to Water Logic)

"(...) being right all the time acquires a huge importance in education, and there is this terror of being wrong. The ego is so tied to being right that later on in life you are reluctant to accept that you are ever wrong, because you are defending not the idea but your self-esteem. (...) this terror of being wrong means that people have enormous difficulties in changing ideas."
— Edward De Bono (PO)

"Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that."
— Edward De Bono (I Am Right You Are Wrong: From This to the New Renaissance: From Rock Logic to Water Logic)

"The text contains no literary criticism. I wanted to describe books, not to be clever at their expense."
— Kenneth McLeish (Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide)

"For our kind, there's always the burning to be more. (...) that is why true human beings feel more pain. Because we _are_ more, but it's never quite enough - never."
— David Zindell (The Broken God)

"How can it be?" she wondered. "I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns....
 But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else -- what do they look to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?"
— Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn)

"When I was alive, I believed - as you do - that time was at least as real and solid as myself and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls.
(...)
You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you understand that - then any time at all will be the right time for you."
— Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn)

"Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident."
— Louis de Bernières (Captain Corelli's Mandolin)

"Love shouldn't beg and demand. Love must have the power to get confidence in itself. Only then it won't be attracted, but will attract."
— Hermann Hesse

"'What is a human being, then?'
'A seed'
'A... seed?'
'An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree.'"
— David Zindell