What would killing the Elders result in?" "Panic? Fear? Three empty parking spaces in the Sanctuary?
Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.
Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.
There is no respect for others without humility in one's self.
Learn to. . . be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.
Civilization is first of all a moral thing. Without truth, respect for duty, love of neighbor, and virtue, everything is destroyed. The morality of a society is alone the basis of civilization.
Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.
What if this were Hell, this absence of sleep, this poet's desert, this pain of living, this dying of not dying, this anguish of shadows, this passion over death and light.
Knowledge is the prime need of the hour.
All you have to do is hold your goal before you and everything else will take care of itself.
Literary science fiction is a very, very narrow band of the publishing business. I love science fiction in more of a pop-culture sense. And by the way, the line between science fiction and reality has blurred a lot in my life doing deep ocean expeditions and working on actual space projects and so on. So I tend to be more fascinated by the reality of the science-fiction world in which we live.