“Desire was only another weapon, like hunger, loneliness, and cold arrayed against him by his tormentors”

“Hunger haunted the dog. It sat like an agony back of his eyes. Hunger ached out of his ladder-rack ribs, those lean ribs that threatened to break through the stretched, shivering skin. Always the dog shivered. When at rest he shivered. Not from cold necessarily, but from hunger, from fear, from loneliness, and from lovelessness— mostly, perhaps, from lovelessness, for the dog had nothing but himself.”

“Desire is in men a hunger, in women only an appetite.”

“Why should we add your book to the atomic weapons arrayed against us by our enemies. Publication of your book would help our enemies.”

“Loneliness comes in two basic varieties. When it results from a desire for solitude, loneliness is a door we close against the world. When the world instead rejects us, loneliness is an open door, unused.”

“A sense of utter loneliness—loneliness inevitable, crushing, eternal, the loneliness of existence, encompassed by the infinite void of unconsciousness—enfolded him as a pall. Life lay like an incubus on his bosom. He shuddered at the thought that death might overlook him, and deny him its refuge.”

“The only remedy against hunger is reasonable birth control.”

“There are many for whom the Qualification of Desirelessness is a difficult one, for they feel that they are their desires — that if their distinctive desires, their likings and dislikings, are taken away from them, there will be no self left. But these are only they who have not seen the Master; in the light of His holy Presence all desire dies, but the desire to be like Him.”

“Fear and Sex are the two most effective weapons that are used against the people. Tempering desire motivates liberation.”

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.”