Wisdom

No zek had the right to stay one second in his workroom without the supervision of a free employee because prudence dictated that the prisoner would be bound to use that unsupervised second to break into the steel safe with a lead pencil, photograph its secret documents with a trouser button, explode an atom bomb, and fly to the moon.

It is certainly true that writers take a stance at some variance from organized religion. This has not always been true. But since the romantic movement - and I'm referring now exclusively to poetry - the emphasis has been on the individual imagination defined against, rather than in terms of, any orthodoxy.

Writing is the emotional morphine.

Confession is always weakness. The grave soul keeps its own secrets, and takes its own punishment in silence.

Feature the good culture to never be like the vulture that doesn't have a good posture in the picture, the structure you make from every adventure gives glory to the creator for his creature, and he will give you treasure from the nature to venture for the future to be the victor.

Wisdom is creating connections between the current perceptual realities with future imaginative possibilities.

How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?

Be not a slave of words.

And the kittykats would have to erect scaffolding and a pulley to get him down. Mind you, I wouldn't put that past them. Sometimes when they are behind the sofa supposedly purring, I think they are drilling.

If you want to know how old a woman is . . . Ask her sister-in-law.

... When someone sees a soul disturbed and unable to see something, he won't laugh mindlessly, but he'll take into consideration whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled by the increased brillance.

There is no truth in him.

...There are times when silence is a poem.

Today's pain is yesterdays latent gain we did not take.

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device.

Woe unto you when all men speak well of you.

A fellowship of secret scholars spent five hundred years on this task. Now we're penciling it in for a Friday morning.