“It was a cold-blooded lie that a god had lovingly made the world and s...” — John Gardner Quote

“It was a cold-blooded lie that a god had lovingly made the world and set out the sun and moon as lights to land dwellers, that brothers had fought, that one of the races was saved, the other cursed. Yet he, the old Shaper, might make it true, by the sweetness of his harp, his cunning trickery. It came to me with a fierce jolt that I wanted it.”

“I knew what I knew, the mindless, mechanical bruteness of things, and when the harper’s lure drew my mind away to hopeful dreams, the dark of what was and always was reached out and snatched my feet.”

“Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.”

“One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are all, without exception - at least some of the time, incompetent or crazy.”

“As in the universe every atom has an effect, however minuscule, on every other atom, so that to pinch the fabric of Time and Space at any point is to shake the whole length and breadth of it, so in fiction every element has effect on every other, so that to change a character's name from Jane to Cynthia is to make the fictional ground shudder under her feet.”

“What do we do by following these words or rules, laws, prophets and their revelations, and religions? We only believe in those who uttered and wrote these words and revelations. However, we do not know if there were any revelations in the first place or even if they were “real” to become the measures or expressions of truth or God automatically. There is nothing beyond this secret except our belief not in God but in the people (so-called prophets).”

“But for the Christians, persecution was fuel to a flame.”

“Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense his own already ... It is like a small child going to its father and saying, 'Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.' It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.”

“When you are in troubled and worried and sick at heart”

“It is easier for people to overlook their differences once they get to know someone.”