Neverness

You are a man. Verily, a polluted stream is man. What have you done to purify yourself? (p80)

Memory is everything. All particles remember the instant the singularity exploded and the universe was born. In a way, the universe is nothing but memory. (p81)

Oh, where does the light go when the light goes out? (p88)

To live, I die. (p305)

There is an ecology of information. Stars will die; people and gods will die, but information is conserved. Macroscopic information decays to microscopic information. But microscopic information is eventually concentrated. Nothing is lost. Gods exist to devour information. The lower intelligences sort, filter, concentrate and organize information. And the gods feed. (p534)

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 The Broken God

"What is a human being, then?" ... "A seed." "A … seed?" "An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree." (p236)

The true human being...is the meaning of the universe. He is a dancing star. He is the exploding singularity pregnant with infinite possibilities. (p236)

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? (p278)

Poems are the dreams of the universe crystallized in words. (p296)

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. (p481)

Faith - what is this emotion but a desperate attempt to escape from mind-burning fear? (p424)

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 The Wild

But it is the nature of life that no emotion is meant to last forever... (p42)

All men are warriors. And life for everything in our universe is nothing but war. (p81)

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. (p91)

Truth, like a woman, must be wooed and won - and this only through the purity of mind and the heart’s deep love. (p388)

This was the true nature of consciousness and the meaning of matter, that ultimately both were one substance without cause or control outside itself. (p518)

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. (p523)

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War in Heaven

That was the true terror of war, that often one had to accept danger and simply wait to live or die. (p207)

"Eternity and pain, pain and eternity -- they are the only two things of which the universe is made." (p173)

The nerves are the reason that man does not easily mistake himself for a god. (p175)

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. (p476)

In an infinite universe, every point in space-time is the center. (p537)

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. (p599)

You must remember that an oak tree is not a crime against the acorn. (p634)