To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore.

As we passed under a streetlamp I noticed, beside my own bobbing shadow, another great, leaping grotesquerie that had an uncanny suggestion of the frog world about it . . . judging from the shadow, it was soaring higher and more gaily than myself. 'Very well,' you will say, 'Why didn’t you turn around. That would be the scientific thing to do.' But let me tell you it is not done ― not on an empty road at midnight.

Great minds have always seen it. That is why man has survived his journey this long. When we fail to wish any longer to be otherwise than what we are, we will have ceased to evolve. Evolution has to be lived forward. I say this as one who has stood above the bones of much that has vanished, and at midnight has examined his own face.

What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk?

Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the meteors whisper greenly overhead. But nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness.

It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes.

I was a shadow among shadows brooding over the fate of other shadows that I alone strove to summon up out of the all-pervading dusk.