In a sense, the better you adapt to school the less your chances are of later adapting to the actual world. So I figure, the worse you adapt to school, the better you will be able to handle reality when you finally manage to get loose at last from school, if that ever happens. But I guess I have what in the military they call a 'poor attitude,' which means 'shape up or ship out.' I always elected to ship out.

A man is an angel that has gone deranged.

That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky.

I mean, knowing people, people are terrified of the unknown and they want to just kill the unknown.

The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.

You mean old books?" "Stories written before space travel but about space travel." "How could there have been stories about space travel before --" "The writers," Pris said, "made it up.

Either I've invented a whole new logic or, ahem, I'm not playing with a full deck.