“As for their healers and their worship of gold books of old lore, there had been tribal stories of this, too, all nonsense, as anything chattered by the ill-informed must be.”

“Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”

“The man who does ill, ill must suffer too.”

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.”

“The preface to the first edition of this book… shows that in 1958 the classification ideas in it were felt to controversial, needing to be championed. A few years before, the had issued a memorandum proclaiming "the need for a faceted classification as the basis of all methods of information retrieval'. As part-author of this memorandum, I must now judge the claim to have been too bold, even brash.”

“There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.”

“Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

“And all the stories had, somewhere, the witch. The wicked old witch.
And Tiffany had thought: Where's the evidence?”

“You mean old books?"

"Stories written before space travel but about space travel."

"How could there have been stories about space travel before --"

"The writers," Pris said, "made it up.”

“Old age is the harbor of all ills.”