If somebody's trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.

Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.

Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new.

Free speech is life itself.

Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.

One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.

The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.