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For there is nothing important except people.
A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.
Those who dream of feasting wake to lamentation. —CHUANG TSE: II
He took it as it came. He was living almost like a young child, among actualities only. He was surprised by nothing, and by everything.
That’s why she’s not here, he thought. She could not have been born gray. Her color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people’s world. She had not been born.
He had no character. He was a lump of clay, a block of uncarved wood.
Though candid was not the right word; Haber was much too complex a person for candor.
Layer after layer might peel off the onion and yet nothing be revealed but more onion.
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. As there was no visible limit to the power Haber wielded through Orr’s dreams, so there was no end to his determination to improve the world.
He could not face his grief, his bereavement. Dream-grief. The loss of a woman who had never existed.
glumdalclitch with the brobdingnag, and we’re all set.… Hell!” He had knocked
You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life’s not a static object, after all.
Life itself is a huge gamble against the odds, against all odds! You can’t try to live safely, there’s no such thing as safety. Stick your neck out of your shell, then, and live fully! It’s not how you get there, but where you get to that counts.
“We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them that way. It just doesn’t work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”
But you don’t know whether what you’re doing is good or evil or both.…”
Speech is silver, silence is gold.
Your God is a jealous God.
You have no social conscience, no altruism. You’re a moral jellyfish.
He gave it one thought and dismissed it.
This life lacked realness; it was hollow; the dream, creating where there was no necessity to create, had worn thin and sleazy. If this was being, perhaps the void was better. He would accept the monsters and the necessities beyond reason. He would go home, and take no drugs, but sleep, and dream what dreams might come.
“One swallow does not make a summer,” it said. “Many hands make light work.”
shied away, as always, from the burned place.) You have to help another person. But it’s not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you’re doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough. You have to… be in touch.
No one else, no thing even, has an existence of its own for him; he sees the world only as a means to his end. It doesn’t make any difference if his end is good; means are all we’ve got.… He can’t accept, he can’t let be, he can’t let go.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow, including good-natured men.
“Nobody can destroy me,” he said, and laughed a little, deep in his chest, almost a sob, “not so long as I have a little help from my friends.
The calm face did not change, but the head nodded once. Like the head of a puppet on a string.
What do you see when you turn out the light? I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine.…
This seemed to be all he had to cross nothingness on. He went forward. He knew as he went that he would lose all he had.
Starlight asked Non-Entity, “Master, do you exist? Or do you not exist?” He got no answer to his question, however.… —CHUANG TSE: XXII
“I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire willpower, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button.” “You have lived well,” the Alien said.
It was there in the sense that in a dream one is somewhere.
His dreams, like waves of the deep sea far from any shore, came and went, rose and fell, profound and harmless, breaking nowhere, changing nothing. They danced the dance among all the other waves in the sea of being.
There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
“I thought you could change the world. Is this the best you could do for us—this mess?” “It’ll have to do,” he said. He would have preferred less of a mess himself, but it wasn’t up to him. And at least it had her in it.
He had sought her as best he could, had not found her, and had turned to his work for solace; it had not given much, but it was the work he was fit to do, and he was a patient man.
But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile...
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“There is time. There are returns. To go is to return.”
