The Many-Coloured Land Quotes

“You have always been alone, always self-centered and fearful of opening yourself to other persons, for to do so is to risk rejection and pain. But it is a risk we are born to take, we humans. We cannot live alone, cannot find happiness or peace alone, cannot love alone. The person alone must always be fleeing, always searching. He flees from the loneliness without end. He searches, whether he will or not, for another who will fill his emptiness.”
― Julian May, The Many-Coloured Land

“Only those who are bereaved of all joy in this present world may take refuge in the shadows of the past.”
― Julian May, The Many-Coloured Land

“laughed out loud.”
― Julian May, The Many-Coloured Land

“As for the fate of the travelers, they were all doomed in one way or another anyhow.”
― Julian May, The Many-Coloured Land

“Isn't biblical Eden an ambivalent symbol? It seems to me that the myth simply shows us that self-awareness and intelligence are perilous. And they can be deadly. But consider the alternative to the Tree of Knowledge. Would anyone want innocence at such a price?”
― Julian May, The Many-Coloured Land

“Some of the older people I've counseled seemed almost disappointed that humanity was spared its just ecological deserts."
"It was tough on the Schadenfreude crowd," Majewski agreed, grinning. "The ones who viewed humankind as a sort of plague organism spoiling what might otherwise have been a pretty good planet. But paleontologists tend to take a long view of life. Some creatures survive, some become extinct. But no matter how great the ecological disaster, the paradox called life keeps on defying entropy and trying to perfect itself. Hard times just seem to help evolution.”
― Julian May, The Many-Coloured Land