David Zindell

The true human being ... is the meaning of the universe. He is a dancing star. He is the exploding singularity pregnant with infinite possibilities.

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.

The secret of life is more life.

Do you want to know the secret of life? Bardo will tell you the secret of life: it's not the amount of time we have, despite what I've just said. No it's not quantity and it's not even quality. It's variety.

This was the true nature of consciousness and the meaning of matter, that ultimately both were one substance without cause or control outside itself.

Truth, like a woman, must be wooed and won - and this only through the purity of mind and the heart’s deep love.

To be what you want to be: isn't this the essence of being human?

The belly is the reason that man does not easily mistake himself for a god.

The memory of all things is in all things, Danlo remembered. Nothing is ever truly lost. "The true Elder Eddas," he said "are universal memories. The One memory is just the memory of the universe itself. The way the universe evolves in conscioiusness of itself and causes itself to be. We are just this blessed consciousness, nothing more, nothing less. We are the light inside light that fuses into the atoms of our bodies; we are the fire that whirls across the stellar deeps and dances all things into being." "Now you are speaking mystically again, Little Fellow." "About some things there is no other way to speak."

All men are warriors. And life for everything in our universe is nothing but war.

A man lusts to become a god ... and there is murder. Murder upon murder upon murder. Why is the world of men nothing but murder?

The elite of the universal religions have always substituted belief in the Infinite for the experience of it. We all need God — but only in small and measured doses. Who can look upon the burning bush and not be destroyed in its flames? Who can bear the heaven and hell of each moment blazing in time? Who can shine like a star? And so, for all but a few of the manswarm, the rare ones who are truly human, it is better to glimpse such a miracle through a dark glass or to grasp it through words only.

"All living things are afraid to die." "No, you're exactly wrong, the only truly alive beings are those unafraid to die."

Faith — what is this emotion but a desperate attempt to escape from mind-burning fear?

For war is never some cosmic accident descending upon a people with all the chance and inevitability of asteroids falling like fire out of the heavens, but only the will and work of man.