Kids could and did swim in it happily as in their native element, at least until some teacher or professor told them they had to come out, dry off, and breathe modernism ever after.
It is strange, exceedingly strange, to know that one’s life has been fulfilled. Yet
His heart going hard.
He thought no more of performing the lesser arts of magic than a bird thinks of flying. Yet a greater, unlearned skill he possessed, which was the art of kindness.
He saw what was up and
Foundations, laid in the dark but well laid. On these, methodically and carefully but with a deftness and certainty that seemed nothing of his own but a knowledge working through him, using him as its...
For though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life.
Existed. He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.
Don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like...
Cats have no guilt and very little shame.
And none could cry Murder, but only Justice done.
All the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a...
A man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or ha...
[T]he status of women in a society is a pretty reliable index of the degree of civilization of that society.
[H.G. Wells said] that his method was to trick his reader into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds. Such prestidigitation is a characte...
[...]falcon-winged, falcon-mad, like an unfalling arrow, like an unforgotten thought.
You’re trying to reach progressive, humanitarian goals with a tool that isn’t suited to the job. Who has humanitarian dreams?
You won’t be running marathons and lifting weights. You may have trouble getting up the stairs. You may have trouble just getting out of bed. You may have trouble getting used to hurting all the time....
You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow...
You shall not go down good twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vas...