“One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life….”
Pt. III, st. 35
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)
“I have more information in one place than anybody in the world.”
Commonly seen with the attribution "Jerry Pournelle, an absurd notion, apparently about the BIX BBS"
Clarified in a reply to reader email http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view402.html#Saturday in Chaos Manor View 402, February 20-26, 2006
Attributed
“For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.”
Pt. III, st. 22
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)
Source: The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems
“I found that it is much more pleasurable to read adventures than to live them.”
Source: The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977), Chapter 23 (p. 210)
Track 13: "The Long Memory." Fellow Workers, Righteous Babe Records (1999)
Black Elk Speaks (1961)
Context: Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.
“I for one find a casual destruction of a man's life even more repugnant than a determined one.”
Source: World of the Five Gods series, The Curse of Chalion (2000), p. 292
