What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.

What good is power when you're too wise to use it?

Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.

Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.

Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.

There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus.