I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. - Ursula K. Le Guin

Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.

A man can trust his luck, but a society can’t; and cultural change, like random mutation, may make things chancier. So they have gone very slowly. At any one point in their history a hasty observer would say that all technological progress and diffusion had ceased. Yet it never has. Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.

No, brother, I'm sane. What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain- you said that! But it's the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy. It's the lies that make you want to kill yourself.