Hell is also the memory of starving children in the slums of Armaghast and the smile of politicians sending boys off to die in colonial wars.
Goddamn fatherfucking asshole politician moral paraplegic dipshit drag-queen bitch!
Choose again.
Suddenly. Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?
[When you meet a swordsman/ meet him with a sword Do not offer a poem to anyone but a poet]
You’ll have to ask him in the next life, said Sol tiredly. He’s dead.
We will revel in hardships and welcome strangeness.
Seduction, he knew, was both science and art—a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.
I love life, Eleanor. It is that simple. Had I the choice, I would live forever, accepting pain and loss as my due and learning--across time--even to appreciate the sharp seasoning of this sadness.
I did not truly know M. Masteen, said the priest. We were not of the same faith. But we were of the same profession; Voice of the Tree Masteen spent much of his life doing what he understood to be God...
He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton.
But, Dad… She hesitated. It will mean raising me all over again. It means suffering through my childhood for a third time. No parent should be asked to do that.Sol managed a smile. No parent would ref...
But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.
Anything which deceives is evil, I believe.
And then you’ll do what I say? Yes. Take us where I’ll tell you to? Yes. No hidden overrides? None that I know of.
Speaking as a novelist myself, I know that members of our profession live in our imaginations as much or more as we inhabit what people call 'the real world'...
… Thou art a dreaming thing; A fever of thyself—think of the Earth; What bliss even in hope is there for thee? What haven? every creature hath its home; Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Wheth...
Was being greeted by a silent, smiling band of bald, retarded children.
No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.
Androids do sleep,