She now knew that the death she feared might not be a physical one, that it could be death of the will, the soul, the mind, the laws, and thus not death, but a perpetual dying.

Measure the hate you feel now, and the shame. That quantity is your capacity also to love and to feel joy and to have compassion.

Money in the hand is real - coins and bills. The rest I don't believe in, and I don't think I ever did, really. What's a check, after all, but a promise - mine, the bank's. Me, I know, but the bank?

I once had a patient who used to practice the most horrible tortures on himself, and when I asked him why he did such things, he said, 'Why before the world does them.' I asked him then, 'Why not wait and see what the world will do?' and he said, 'Don't you see? It always come at last, but this way at least I am master of my own destruction.

I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else." The second part was more a plea, and to her surprise the superbly inhuman fighter smiled softly and said, "Yes ... I suppose that's true, though I never thought of it in those terms before.

The woman was sane; she accepted the heavy penalties of reality and enjoyed its gifts also.

To praise one thing is not to damn another.