"Irreconcilables: he should stay here and conform; he should — not stay here (remembering no time when he was not here, Harley could frame the second idea no more clearly than that). Another point of pain was that "here" and "not here" seemed to be not two halves of a homogeneous whole, but two dissonances."

"They came, by what means he did not know, from outside, the vast abstraction that none of them had ever seen. He had a mental picture of a starry void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it. Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behavior of his companions; if they never spoke about outside, did they think about it?"

"Did the others here feel the disquiet he felt? Had they a reason for concealing that disquiet? And another question: Where was "here"? He shut that one down sharply. Deal with one thing at a time. Grope your way gently to the abyss. Categorize your knowledge."

"The thing was not discussable, even with a near acquaintance like Calvin because … because of the nature of the thing … because one had to behave like a normal, unworried human being. That at least was sound and clear and gave him comfort: behave like a normal human being."

"The house was a rambling affair. It had few windows, and such as there were did not open, were unbreakable and admitted no light. Darkness lay everywhere; illumination from an invisible source followed one's entry into a room — the black had to be entered before it faded. Every room was furnished, but with odd pieces that bore little relation to each other, as if there was no purpose for the room. Rooms equipped for purposeless beings have that air about them."

"What would be the effect of gradually drawing away from the iron laws under which, since its scampering pleistocene infancy, humankind had lived?"

"Insane? To disobey a law of the universe was impossible, not insane."

"All the time, he hoped they would understand that his arrogance masked only shyness—or did he hope that it was his shyness which masked arrogance? He did not know. Who could presume to know? The one quality holds much of the other. Both refuse to come forward and share."

"The only sort of tasks worth being set were impossible ones."

"At least the mentor’s point was made: loneliness was psychological, not statistical."

"Men left their strange hobbies on Earth and Venus and projected themselves into the pattern. Their entire personalities were merged with the texture of space itself. Through science, they reached immortality. It was a one-way passage. They did not return. Each Involute carried thousands or even millions of people. There they were, not dead, not living. How they exulted or wept in their transubstantiation, no one left could say. Only this could be said: man had gone, and a great emptiness was fallen over Earth."

"When the first flint, the first shell, was shaped into a weapon, that action shaped man. As he molded and complicated his tools, so they molded and complicated him. He became the first scientific animal. And at last, via information theory and great computers, he gained knowledge of all his parts. He formed the Laws of Integration, which reveal all beings as part of a pattern and show them their part in the pattern. There is only the pattern; the pattern is all the universe, creator and created."

"Carnage added to carnage does not equal peace."

"I kill from conviction, not to pass a personality quiz."

"It’s the duty of men in office not to be misled."

"The ability to change should not be despised."

"If you think with your emotions, slight glandular changes are sufficient to revise your entire outlook."

"Why don’t you go somewhere quietly and consult your history books if you have no consciences to consult?"

"Never, never let action become a substitute for thought."

"There was a time, two or three centuries ago, when it looked as if the intellect might win over the body, and our species become something worthwhile. But too much procreation killed that illusion."

"He had the settled expression of a certain kind of peasant—the kind that accepts, with protest but without malice, the vagaries of life. It is the gift life sends to compensate for the lack of a high I.Q."

"“They enjoy their show of might,” Adam said. “These people have to express their unhappiness by using ugly things like guns and ill-fitting uniforms, and the whole conception of the camp.”"

"“You see life as a contrast between misery and pleasure, Jon; that is not a correct interpretation.” “It’s a pretty good rule of thumb, I should have thought.” “Thought and non-thought is the only valid line of comparison.” “Bit of a bird’s-eye view, isn’t it? That puts us on the same level as the proles.” “Exactly.”"

"He gets bored with the effort of trying to think, and is unhappy because he knows thinking, or at least “thinking-to-a-purpose” is on the black list of party activities."

"You know why I am a prisoner—because the laws are so stupid that we prefer to break them than to live by them, although it means life-long imprisonment."

"“The intelligent have been overwhelmed by the dull. Is that not an invasion?” “More, I would say, of a self-betrayal.”"

"Poor little warrior, science will never invent anything to assist the titanic death you want in the contra-terrene caverns of your fee-fi-fo-fumblingly fearful id!"

"You are like all cruel men, sentimental; you are like all sentimental men; squeamish."

"You know that if you had been in charge of creation you would have found some medium less heart-breaking than Time to stage it in."

"If adolescence did not exist it would be unnecessary to invent it!"

"You were fool enough to think that one hundred and fifty million years either way made an ounce of difference to the muddle of thoughts in a man’s cerebral vortex."

"Why should you be confused just because you come from a confused civilization?"

"The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust."

"Poverty is the natural state for humanity. Wealth starts in the stomach and corrupts it.…"

"Only a madman would claim that there is some thing unreal about reality."

"That is why you are so troubled. You see through the deception, yet you refuse to see through the deception."

"The stone in my hand hides A secret natural history: Climates and times unknown, A river unseen."

"I knew there was no ultimate ‘secret of the universe’—and in any case, supposing humanity to be merely a construct of the Korlevalulaw: who then ‘constructed’ the Korlevalulaw? The prime question was merely set back one step."

"The quest for pattern is a basic instinct."

"What we do not know is what became of the Korlevalulaw. They must have reigned so long, they must have been so invincible to all but Time."

"The greatest human achievement is to fulfil one’s destiny."

"Most of my poetry lies beyond the SF field, yet here I am corralled into 'SF poetry' as part of this poetry weekend. Of course, some might say, 'you've made your own bed — now you must lie in it!' But, while fully accepting that dictum, I'm not yet quite prepared to lie down..."

"Digging deep in a Martian desert men discovered an enormous brain. It suddenly started to think at them — So they covered it up again..."

"I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer."

"Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem."

"Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name."

"There has always been a belief in miracles in the popular mind. As L. Sprague de Camp once said, the public would rather be bunked than debunked."

"All of which makes one feel that the centuries of science upon which our western culture is based have travelled unmarked through the popular mind. A surprising number of people are willing to junk the entire accumulation of knowledge since Ancient Greece after watching Uri Geller perform for five minutes on their twenty-three inch screen."

"Aldiss’s second law of thermo-linguistics states that what is most popular is rarely best and that what is best is rarely most popular."

"One of the objections I have against Campbell's Astounding was that there was too little love in it. It was a very loveless magazine. They never took enough account of the feeling that is always in SF."