David Zindell

Life moved ever outward into infinite possibilities and yet all things were perfect and finished in every single moment, their end attained.

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

What's beautiful is that a creator can be astonished by his own creations.

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.

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

Any robot sufficiently intelligent to clean dishes is too intelligent to clean dishes.

But it is the nature of life that no emotion is meant to last forever...

In time, the heart of each religion grows hard and dies. And so seekers of the godly will always turn to new prophets and new ways, never realizing that, ultimately, all religions separate man from God.

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

For us humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down.

"What is a human being, then?" ... "A seed." "A … seed?" "An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree."

Poems are the dreams of the universe crystallized in words.

For it is only in accepting death that one can truly live, and for the human animal, death has always been the great black beast from the abyss to be dreaded or defeated or avoided or hated - but never looked upon clearly face to face.

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

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."