Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it’s then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.

We are all dead, and we spoiled the world before we died. There is nothing left. Nothing but dreams.

If we hide, Therru, we feed him. We will eat. And we will starve him.

But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.

Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.

Why had he lived so long among those who were not kind?

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

Games and stories are imitations of life, ways of playing at life, sometimes ways of learning how to live. Some of the rules may appear both cruel and arbitrary. But if you want to play the game, or live the life, you have to follow them.

You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.

All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.

It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together.

Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think

An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered all in one moment with its roots in his loins and its flowers in his mind.

“Do you know how to read?” “No. It is one of the black arts.” He nodded. “But a useful one,” he said.

To deny the past is to deny the future.

In this effort to attain security, independence and privacy of course were suspect...

The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their truth-telling to sentimental platitude.

He seemed not to know the uses of silence.

I made myself a vessel. I know its shape. But not the clay. Life danced me. I know the dances. But I don't know who the dancer is.

It was a cold that got into the bone, into the marrow, and would not be dislodged.

I look at the world, at the forests and the mountains here, the sky, and it's all right, as it should be. But we aren't. People aren't. We're wrong. We do wrong. No animal does wrong. How could they? But we can, and we do. And we never stop.

He seemed not to know the uses of silence.

Stealthily the stars slid forward into nothingness.

I was in too much haste, and now have no time left.

I’m not dead. I sleep sometimes. Sleep comes very close to death, everyone knows that. The dead walk in dreams, everyone knows that. They come to you alive, and they say things. They walk out of death into the dreams.

I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls.

Fantasy as an assembly-line commodity leaves me cold.

A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

Wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.

You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes – the walls, the walls!

Injustice makes the rules and courage breaks them.

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

All or nothing, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?

Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn.

In this effort to attain security, independence and privacy of course were suspect...

The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.

But in time nothing can be without becoming.

We're in the world, not against it.

You are like a lantern swathed and covered, hidden away in a dark place. Yet the light shines; they could not put out the light. They could not hide you.

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?

And after a while he saw at the faint outermost edge of the light a shadow that came towards him over the sand. At first it was shapeless, but as it drew nearer it took on the look of a man.

And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change.

For to keep dark the mind of the mageborn, that is a dangerous thing.

All her life she had looked into dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went out beyond the stars.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.