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.

Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood.

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.

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?

We cannot pluck a flower witout disturbing a star.

For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.

Many of us who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks are prisoners drawing mental maps of escape.