Life, unlike the inanimate, will take the long way round to circumvent barrenness. A kind of desperate will resides even in a root.

This is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is . . . the supreme epitome of the reaching out.

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

Over the whole earth- this infinitely small globe that possesses all we know of sunshine and bird song- an unfamiliar blight is creeping: man- man, who has become at last a planetary disease and who would, if his technology yet permitted, pass this infection to another star.

Each man deciphers from the ancient alphabets of nature only those secrets that his own deeps possess the power to endow with meaning.

The creature called man has a strange history. He is not of one piece, nor was he born of a single moment in time. His elementary substance is stardust almost as old as the universe.

You think that way as you begin to get grayer and you see pretty plainly that the game is not going to end as you planned.