“Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy?”

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

We are been taught to be ashamed of not being ‘outgoing’. But a writer’s job is ingoing.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early.

You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.

For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… By using words well they strengthen their souls.

To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.

I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.

And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.

What good is music? None … and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘

We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people .

While we read a novel, we are insane-bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices… Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.

What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.

Those little paws gifted me the galaxy of a sweet home.

There are galaxies inside of me for each emotion I feel. One for each; happiness, anger, sadness and one is hollow, for that too, is sometimes how I feel.

Don’t try too hard to make your galaxy shine in front of everyone, not every star shines from the other galaxy.

Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.

There are as many atoms in one molecule of DNA as there are stars in a typical galaxy.

There are as many atoms in one molecule of DNA as there are stars in a typical galaxy.

Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars – billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.