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The past cannot be found in the future where it is not—not until the metaphysical world, which is so much larger and so much slower than the physical world, completes its revolution and the New Sun comes.
Just as when I had first left the Citadel I had pulled up my hood so that the passersby might not observe my smiles, so now I hid my face to conceal the tears running down my cheeks.
I recalled how I had dreamed, only two nights before, of a world in which all the people knew themselves bound by ties of blood, being all descended from the same pair of colonists. I, who did not know my own mother’s name, or my father’s, might very well be related to this child whose name was my own, or for that matter to anyone I met. The world of which I had dreamed had been, for me, the bed on which I had lain.
Now it struck me that the will itself was governed, and if not by reason, then by things below or above it. Yet it was very difficult to say on what side of reason these things lay. Instinct, surely, lay below it; but might it not be above it as well?
I have had many great adventures, and the greatest adventures are those that act most strongly upon our minds.
It is courtesy that is truthful. When the plebeian kneels to the monarch, he is offering his neck. He offers it because he knows his ruler can take it if he wishes.
one of the easiest ways to dominate a man is to demand something he cannot supply.
“When we sleep,” Merryn told me, “we move from temporality to eternity.” “When we wake,” the Cumaean whispered, “we lose the facility to see beyond the present moment.” “She never wakes,” Merryn boasted.
She is in the past we never knew and the future we will not see. Put out more sail, Captain, for the universe is leaving us behind…”
“Those who write the approved texts,” I told him, “cannot themselves be quoting from approved texts as they write. Therefore even an approved text may contain elements of disloyalty.”
most men think they make their homes for their families, but the fact is that they make both homes and families for themselves.”
I am saying that the things we love in others and admire in ourselves spring from things we do not see and seldom think about.
“You’re a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism doesn’t make materialism true. Don’t you know that? In the final summing up, it is spirit and dream, thought and love and act that matter.”
