I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.
Call themselves? asked Yama. You are wrong, Sam, Godhood is more than a name. It is a condition of being. One does not achieve it merely by being immortal, for even the lowliest laborer in the fields...
In a world of physical ease, brutal social equality, and reasonable economic equality, exclusiveness in frivolity becomes the most sought-after of all distinctions.
Things sort of equal to equal things sort of being equal to each other, it didn’t much seem to matter.
In the State of Denmark there was the odor of decay...
It is because I am a man who occasionally aspires to things beyond the belly and the phallus.
Only a fool believes that life has but one meaning.
I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.
You are a fool to speak of last great battles, Sam, for the last great battle is always the next one.
Nobody steals books but your friends.
An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time. One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding.
Did you ever look back at some moment in your past and have it suddenly grow so vivid that all the intervening years seemed brief, dreamlike, impersonal—the motions of a May afternoon surrendered to r...
Your woman is gone and your heart is heavy. Words will not lighten the weight, and what is written is written. But let it also be put down that I grieve with you. ~Hasan~
Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentio...
It is said that the dead forget the dead in the house of Hades, Cassandra, but I hoped it was not so.
One of the disadvantages of traveling alone is that when you fall there is none to assist you.
Once a Buddha, always a Buddha, Sam. Dust off some of your old parables. You have about fifteen minutes.' Sam held out his hand. Give me some tobacco and a paper.
I feel obligated to point out, though, that I have always been a sucker for ideas I find aesthetically pleasing. The cosmic sweep of the thing - an interstellar kula chain - affirming the differences...
Years have passed, I suppose. I'm not really counting them anymore. But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there is a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time somewhere, s...
I like libraries. It makes me feel comfortable and secure to have walls of words, beautiful and wise, all around me. I always feel better when I can see that there is something to hold back the shadow...