“Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.”

“The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love.”

“What we leave behind in this life is the memory of who we were and what we did. An imprint, no more.”

“We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”

“In all my work what I try to say is that as human beings we are more alike than we are unalike.”

“The loss of what we have is pain more dire
Than not to gain the thing that we desire.”

“Immensely powerful though we are today, it's equally clear that we're going to be even more powerful tomorrow. And what's more there will be greater compulsion upon us to use our power as the number of human beings on Earth increases still further. Clearly we could devastate the world. [… ] As far as we know, the Earth is the only place in the universe where there is life. Its continued survival now rests in our hands.”

“Perhaps it is a benevolent provision of Nature that we remember more what touches than what pains us.”

“There wasn't any answer to that. So he tried harder, and the question got more circumstantial and tentative, and at the same time more precise and exact; and still there were no answers, only the fuller and fuller form of the question, evolving as Auberon had described to her all life evolving, reaching out limbs and inventing organs, reticulating joints, doing and being in more and more complex yet more and more compact and individuated ways, until the question, perfectly asked, understood its own answerlessness.”

“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.”