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David Zindell Quotes

David Zindell is an American writer known for science fiction and fantasy epics. He was born in Toledo, Ohio, and resides today in Boulder, Colorado, where he works as a test coach; he received a BA degree in mathematics and minored in anthropology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His first published story was "The Dreamer's Sleep" in Fantasy Book in 1984; his novelette Shanidar, which formed the core of his first novel Neverness, won the Writers of the Future Contest in 1985. David Zindell's writing style is at once romantic, heroic, deeply poetic and concerns itself with deep philosophical issues in the human psyche. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1986. John Clute writes that the author of Neverness is "romantic, ambitious, and skilled.", and Gene Wolfe, who is connected with Zindell in a way Wolfe himself was with Jack Vance, described Zindell as "...one of the finest talents to appear since Kim Stanley Robinson and William Gibson — perhaps the finest."In the series started by Neverness, David Zindell probes the nature of future humanity in "an extremely ambitious tale...The young protagonist has all the necessary complexity and drivenness to occupy centre-stage 'cosmogony opera'." His fantasy series, The Ea Cycle has as a theme the evolution of consciousness, through the MO of sword-and-sorcery. Wikipedia  

✵ 28. November 1952

Works

Neverness
Neverness
David Zindell
The Broken God
The Broken God
David Zindell
David Zindell: 34   quotes 3   likes

Famous David Zindell Quotes

“The belly is the reason that man does not easily mistake himself for a god.”

David Zindell

Source: War in Heaven (1998), P. 175

“Truth, like a woman, must be wooed and won - and this only through the purity of mind and the heart’s deep love.”

David Zindell

Source: The Wild (1995), p. 388

“"All living things are afraid to die."
"No, you're exactly wrong, the only truly alive beings are those unafraid to die."”

David Zindell book Neverness

Neverness (1988)

“In time, the heart of each religion grows hard and dies. And so seekers of the godly will always turn to new prophets and new ways, never realizing that, ultimately, all religions separate man from God.”

David Zindell book The Broken God

Source: The Broken God (1992), p. 481

“"What is a human being, then?"…
"A seed."
"A … seed?"
"An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree."”

David Zindell book The Broken God

Source: The Broken God (1992), p. 236

David Zindell Quotes about space

“The true human being … is the meaning of the universe. He is a dancing star. He is the exploding singularity pregnant with infinite possibilities.”

David Zindell book The Broken God

Source: The Broken God (1992), p. 236

“Poems are the dreams of the universe crystallized in words.”

David Zindell book The Broken God

Source: The Broken God (1992), p. 296

“The universe is a womb for the genesis of gods.”

David Zindell book Neverness

Neverness (1988)

“In an infinite universe, every point in space-time is the center.”

David Zindell

Source: War in Heaven (1998), p. 537

“All men are warriors. And life for everything in our universe is nothing but war.”

David Zindell

Source: The Wild (1995), p. 81

“The elite of the universal religions have always substituted belief in the Infinite for the experience of it. We all need God — but only in small and measured doses. Who can look upon the burning bush and not be destroyed in its flames? Who can bear the heaven and hell of each moment blazing in time? Who can shine like a star? And so, for all but a few of the manswarm, the rare ones who are truly human, it is better to glimpse such a miracle through a dark glass or to grasp it through words only.”

David Zindell

Source: War in Heaven (1998), p. 476

David Zindell Quotes about life

“I am not interested in things getting better; what I want is more: more human beings, more dreams, more history, more consciousness, more suffering, more joy, more disease, more agony, more rapture, more evolution, more life.”

David Zindell book Neverness

from the meditations of Jin Zenimura
Neverness (1988)

“Do you want to know the secret of life? Bardo will tell you the secret of life: it's not the amount of time we have, despite what I've just said. No it's not quantity and it's not even quality. It's variety.”

David Zindell book Neverness

Neverness (1988)

“The secret of life is more life.”

David Zindell book Neverness

Neverness (1988)

“Life moved ever outward into infinite possibilities and yet all things were perfect and finished in every single moment, their end attained.”

David Zindell book Neverness

Neverness (1988)

“But it is the nature of life that no emotion is meant to last forever…”

David Zindell

Source: The Wild (1995), p. 42

David Zindell Quotes

“We are just this blessed consciousness, nothing more, nothing less. We are the light inside light that fuses into the atoms of our bodies; we are the fire that whirls across the stellar deeps and dances all things into being.”

David Zindell

Source: War in Heaven (1998), p. 599
Context: The memory of all things is in all things, Danlo remembered. Nothing is ever truly lost.
"The true Elder Eddas," he said "are universal memories. The One memory is just the memory of the universe itself. The way the universe evolves in conscioiusness of itself and causes itself to be. We are just this blessed consciousness, nothing more, nothing less. We are the light inside light that fuses into the atoms of our bodies; we are the fire that whirls across the stellar deeps and dances all things into being."
"Now you are speaking mystically again, Little Fellow."
"About some things there is no other way to speak."

Light , Dance

“The memory of all things is in all things”

David Zindell

Source: War in Heaven (1998), p. 599
Context: The memory of all things is in all things, Danlo remembered. Nothing is ever truly lost.
"The true Elder Eddas," he said "are universal memories. The One memory is just the memory of the universe itself. The way the universe evolves in conscioiusness of itself and causes itself to be. We are just this blessed consciousness, nothing more, nothing less. We are the light inside light that fuses into the atoms of our bodies; we are the fire that whirls across the stellar deeps and dances all things into being."
"Now you are speaking mystically again, Little Fellow."
"About some things there is no other way to speak."

Memory

“Oh, where does the light go when the light goes out?”

David Zindell book Neverness

p88
Neverness (1988)

Light

“For it is only in accepting death that one can truly live, and for the human animal, death has always been the great black beast from the abyss to be dreaded or defeated or avoided or hated - but never looked upon clearly face to face.”

David Zindell

Source: The Wild (1995), p. 91

Death , Hate , Animals

“That was the true terror of war, that often one had to accept danger and simply wait to live or die.”

David Zindell

Source: War in Heaven (1998), p. 207

War , Waiting

“This was the true nature of consciousness and the meaning of matter, that ultimately both were one substance without cause or control outside itself.”

David Zindell

Source: The Wild (1995), p. 518

Nature

“Faith — what is this emotion but a desperate attempt to escape from mind-burning fear?”

David Zindell book The Broken God

Source: The Broken God (1992), p. 424

Fear , Faith

“A man lusts to become a god … and there is murder. Murder upon murder upon murder. Why is the world of men nothing but murder?”

David Zindell book The Broken God

Source: The Broken God (1992), p. 278

Men , God , World

“For war is never some cosmic accident descending upon a people with all the chance and inevitability of asteroids falling like fire out of the heavens, but only the will and work of man.”

David Zindell

Source: The Wild (1995), p. 523

War , People , Chance

“For us humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down.”

David Zindell book Neverness

Emil Sinclair
Neverness (1988)

Men , Law , Distant

“If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.”

David Zindell book Neverness

Lyall Watson
Neverness (1988)

Understanding

“You must remember that an oak tree is not a crime against the acorn.”

David Zindell

Source: War in Heaven (1998), p. 634

Tree

“Any robot sufficiently intelligent to clean dishes is too intelligent to clean dishes.”

David Zindell book Neverness

Neverness (1988)

Intelligence

“Eternity and pain, pain and eternity — they are the only two things of which the universe is made.”

David Zindell

Source: War in Heaven (1998), p. 173

Pain , Universe

“Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise.”

David Zindell book Neverness

Fravashi saying (from the formularies of Osho the Fool)
Neverness (1988)

“All living things are afraid to die.”

David Zindell book Neverness

"No, you're exactly wrong, the only truly alive beings are those unafraid to die."
Neverness (1988)

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