I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis. To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.
In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.
Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion
…Data itself… was tolerable. It was the constant nerve-web-expanding pain of context that would kill him.
In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.
Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction – books and a sense of irony.
They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls.
… The continuation of her life was more than another day of breathing, but was the gift of another day of engagement with her beloved across the spectrum of all things.
The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.
His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.
What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?
To see and feel one’s beloved naked for the first time is one of life’s pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow.
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 refuse that, Rachel.
Who are you, Hockenberry, to thwart Fate and defy the Will of the Gods?I am me, Thomas Hockenberry. I am fed up with these power-addled thugs who call themselves gods.
No lifetime is long enough for those who wish to create, Raul. Or for those who simply wish to understand themselves and their lives. It is, perhaps, the curse of being human, but also a blessing.
In such seconds of decision entire futures are made
… you “met” this Moneta … or whatever her real name is … in her past but your future … in a meeting that’s still to come
She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark – what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard …
The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.
All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.
There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.
Life is brutal that way… the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.
Look,’ said Tyrena. ‘In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.
Love was as hardwired into the structure of the universe as gravity and matter.
… pain has been with him since birth – the universe’s gift to a poet …
As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to.
evolution is not progress, that there is no ‘goal’ or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution ‘succeeds’ if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe.
I desperately want to talk to her now. I want to ask her who it was who so deftly crafted and shaped the legend that was our love.
… all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.
It was as if they had climbed the last hill in creation.
Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.
It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.
The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals.
Eagles are extinct,” grumbled Morpurgo. “Perhaps they should have attacked the sky. It betrayed them.
The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.
I could not do this, I realized, if I were immortal. This degree of love of life and of one another is granted, I saw for once and for ever, not to immortals, but to those who live briefly and always under the shadow of death and loss.
If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.
… a comment with the idle arrogance common of such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.
The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.
So many important things pass quickly without being understood at the time. So many powerful moments are buried beneath the absurd
I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.
At that moment I would have welcomed spider-rats nibbling on my toes about as much as the idea of chatting with a missionary priest.
The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall.
The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer
I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.
Writing, I’m convinced, should be a subversive activity – frowned on by the authorities – and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.