“it is an ocean of burning oil I am cast adrift upon, no seas repose; I pass from waking agonies to the semiconscious trance of torment in which the smaller, earlier, deeper rings of the brain know ...”

“Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; thats the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any con...”

“Yes of course I know it's all a dream. Isn't everything?”

“...for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not ...”

“To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constpatory too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.”

“As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.”

“Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.”

“Qualsiasi uomo notevole, chiunque cio non appartenga a quei 5/6 dell'umanit dotati tanto miseramente dalla natura, rimarr dopo i quarant'anni difficilmente esente da una certa traccia di misantropia.”

“Most people are full of themselves and speak only the obnoxiously superficial, in other words they're annoying as hell”

“Many women say that verbal violence causes more harm than physical violence because it damages self-esteem so deeply. Women have not wanted to hear battered women say that the verbal abuse was as h...”

“Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months of years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with ...”

“Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, ...”

“Theres no way you can kill someone and get to the other side of the experience unchanged.”

“Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled enemy?”

“He had also learned that there is no use murdering people; there are always so many left, and if you tried to murder them all you would never get anything else done.”