“When a man is one of a kind, he will be lonely wherever he is.”
“. . . What do you wish to be? What would you like to become?”
I did not know, and I told her so, but the question worried me. Should I know?
“There is time,” she said, “but the sooner you know, the sooner you can plan. To have a goal is the important thing, and to work toward it. Then, if you decide you wish to do something different, you will at least have been moving, you will have been going somewhere, you will have been learning.”
“I do not think much of ages. People are people. What does it matter how old or young they are? It is a category, and I do not like categories. It is a sort of pigeonhole or a label.”
“To live in a city, one must be larger than one's environment or enjoy belonging to the crowd.”
“People only talk about how wonderful youth is when they have forgotten how hard it was.”
“I can't tell you how much I don't care.”
“Knowledge is awareness, and to it there are many paths, not all of them paved with logic. But sometimes one is guided through the maze by intuition. One is led by something felt in the wind, something seen in the stars, something that calls from the wasteland to the spirit.
To receive the message, the mental pores must be open. And we white men in striving for our success, in seeking to build a new world from what lies around us, sometimes forget that there are other ways, sometimes forget the Lonesome Gods of the far places, the gods who live on the empty sea, who dance with the dust devils and who wait quietly in the shadows under the cliffs where ancient men once marked their passing with hands.”
“....the regional mental asylum. The SS is in charge. They have built a special crematorium. Those who are not wanted are taken up in a kind of police van.People here call it "the whispering coach". The relatives receive the urn. Recently one family here received two urns at once.
- We now have pure communism. But communism murders more honestly.”
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
“The real reason I couldn’t tear my gaze away, the thing that
turned my muscles to ice even as my skin burned, was the one
and only thought running through my mind: That’s him. That is
the guy from my dream.”
“We could show them the most exquisite Ming vase, or a carved ivory screen from Persia, and they’d turn their backs and go straight for the human remains.”
“I’m assuming you’re as mystified by this as the rest of us, Rasputin.
No. I’m not. I have been planning to destroy the Breakworld since I was a child.
[silence]
This is why I don’t make so many jokes. I never know when is good.”
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