“Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls”
“Of all the animals in creation, politicians have the shortest memories.”
Pavel Laszlo in Ch. 15, p. 260
The Ringmaster (1991)
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: All hopes and despairs vanish in the voracious, funneling whirlwind of God. God laughs, wails, kills, sets us on fire, and then leaves us in the middle of the way, charred embers.
And I rejoice to feel between my temples, in the flicker of an eyelid, the beginning and the end of the world.
I condense into a lightning moment the seeding, sprouting, blossoming, fructifying, and the disappearance of every tree, animal, man, star, and god.
All Earth is a seed planted in the coils of my mind. Whatever struggles for numberless years to unfold and fructify in the dark womb of matter bursts in my head like a small and silent lightning flash.
Ah! let us gaze intently on this lightning flash, let us hold it for a moment, let us arrange it into human speech.
Let us transfix this momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future, but without losing in the immobility of language any of its gigantic erotic whirling.
“There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.”
“The Evitable Conflict”, p. 189
Source: I, Robot (1950)
“I'm really intrigued by those eternal questions of creation and belief and faith.”
Esquire interview (2012)
Context: I'm really intrigued by those eternal questions of creation and belief and faith. I don't care who you are, it's what we all think about. It's in the back of all our minds.
“A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.”
Source: Duma Key
“Beauty, the eternal Spouse of the Wisdom of God
and Angel of his Presence thru' all creation.”
Book IV, lines 1-2.
The Testament of Beauty (1929-1930)
“The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.”
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 132.
