So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.

Talking, talking, spinning a spell, pale skin of words that closes me in like a coffin.

I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears.

Pick an apocalypse, any apocalypse. A sea of black oil and dead things. No wind. No light. Nothing stirring, not even an ant, a spider. A silent universe. Such is the end of the flicker of time, the brief, hot fuse of events and ideas set off, accidentally, and snuffed out, accidentally, by man. Not a real ending of course, nor even a beginning. Mere ripple in Time's stream.

The hero sees values beyond what's possible. That's the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile.

Revolution, my dear prince, is not the substitution of immoral for moral, or of illegitimate for legitimate violence; it is simply the pitting of power against power, where the issue is freedom for the winners and enslavement of the rest.

Beauty requires contrast.

All order, I've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal -- a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world -- two snake-pits.

Fate often enough will spare a man if his courage holds.

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