David Zindell

You must remember that an oak tree is not a crime against the acorn.

David Zindell (born November 28, 1952) is an American science fiction and fantasy author with a degree in mathematics. His first published story was "The Dreamer's Sleep" in Fantasy Book in 1984 and he won the Writers of the Future contest the following year. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1986.

Quotes

Neverness (1988)

• To be what you want to be: isn't this the essence of being human?

• Life moved ever outward into infinite possibilities and yet all things were perfect and finished in every single moment, their end attained.

• Any robot sufficiently intelligent to clean dishes is too intelligent to clean dishes.

• The secret of life is more life.

• Do you want to know the secret of life? Bardo will tell you the secret of life: it's not the amount of time we have, despite what I've just said. No it's not quantity and it's not even quality. It's variety.

• What's beautiful is that a creator can be astonished by his own creations.

• For us humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down.
  • Emil Sinclair

• I am not interested in things getting better; what I want is more: more human beings, more dreams, more history, more consciousness, more suffering, more joy, more disease, more agony, more rapture, more evolution, more life.
  • from the meditations of Jin Zenimura

• If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.
  • Lyall Watson

• Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise.
  • Fravashi saying (from the formularies of Osho the Fool)

• Oh, where does the light go when the light goes out? (p88)

• The universe is a womb for the genesis of gods.

• "All living things are afraid to die."
  "No, you're exactly wrong, the only truly alive beings are those unafraid to die."

The Broken God (1992)

• "What is a human being, then?" ...
  "A seed."
  "A … seed?"
  "An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree."
  • p. 236

• The true human being ... is the meaning of the universe. He is a dancing star. He is the exploding singularity pregnant with infinite possibilities.
  • p. 236

• A man lusts to become a god ... and there is murder. Murder upon murder upon murder. Why is the world of men nothing but murder?
  • p. 278

• Poems are the dreams of the universe crystallized in words.
  • p. 296

• In time, the heart of each religion grows hard and dies. And so seekers of the godly will always turn to new prophets and new ways, never realizing that, ultimately, all religions separate man from God.
  • p. 481

• Faith — what is this emotion but a desperate attempt to escape from mind-burning fear?
  • p. 424

The Wild (1995)

• But it is the nature of life that no emotion is meant to last forever...
  • p. 42

• All men are warriors. And life for everything in our universe is nothing but war.
  • p. 81

• For it is only in accepting death that one can truly live, and for the human animal, death has always been the great black beast from the abyss to be dreaded or defeated or avoided or hated - but never looked upon clearly face to face.
  • p. 91

• Truth, like a woman, must be wooed and won - and this only through the purity of mind and the heart’s deep love.
  • p. 388

• This was the true nature of consciousness and the meaning of matter, that ultimately both were one substance without cause or control outside itself.
  • p. 518

• For war is never some cosmic accident descending upon a people with all the chance and inevitability of asteroids falling like fire out of the heavens, but only the will and work of man.
  • p. 523

War in Heaven (1998)

• That was the true terror of war, that often one had to accept danger and simply wait to live or die.
  • p. 207

• Eternity and pain, pain and eternity — they are the only two things of which the universe is made.
  • p. 173

• The belly is the reason that man does not easily mistake himself for a god.
  • P. 175

• The elite of the universal religions have always substituted belief in the Infinite for the experience of it. We all need God — but only in small and measured doses. Who can look upon the burning bush and not be destroyed in its flames? Who can bear the heaven and hell of each moment blazing in time? Who can shine like a star? And so, for all but a few of the manswarm, the rare ones who are truly human, it is better to glimpse such a miracle through a dark glass or to grasp it through words only.
  • p. 476

• In an infinite universe, every point in space-time is the center.
  • p. 537

• The memory of all things is in all things, Danlo remembered. Nothing is ever truly lost.
  "The true Elder Eddas," he said "are universal memories. The One memory is just the memory of the universe itself. The way the universe evolves in conscioiusness of itself and causes itself to be. We are just this blessed consciousness, nothing more, nothing less. We are the light inside light that fuses into the atoms of our bodies; we are the fire that whirls across the stellar deeps and dances all things into being."
  "Now you are speaking mystically again, Little Fellow."
  "About some things there is no other way to speak."
  • p. 599

• You must remember that an oak tree is not a crime against the acorn.
  • p. 634