Except just in little moments, and not those very often, they never said anything about their feeling.
– Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
Let’s agree to meet a thousand years from now and have a party.
– Clifford Pickover, A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality
According to the legend, when humans were first created from mud, the resulting creatures could not see and dissolved if caught in the rain.
– Clifford Pickover, A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality
Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a symbolic rather than a practical value, had each been pressed to serve distortion rather than reality.
– Brian Aldiss, Greybeard
I tried to explain that the freedom I have always desired has nothing to do with being able to travel or with surrendering responsibility; it means not being afraid, not disguising myself and not performing, not structuring my feelings to gain another’s approval.
– Jerzy Kosinski, The Devil Tree
There’s a level where force is bad, but when you get to the sort of level we are down to, force becomes strength, and then it’s a positive blessing.
– Brian Aldiss, Greybeard
I don’t much care where so long as I get somewhere.
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
‘Be what you would seem to be’ – or, if you’d like it put more simply – ‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
But isn’t genius a kind of crime against the routine of the past that our time punishes more severely than crime itself, since scholars die in hospitals bleaker than any prison?
– Marcel Proust, The Lemoine Affair