16 quotes
Any attempt at willful ignorance would now be futile or worse; the only talisman against excessive knowledge that might have puissance would be more knowledge.
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
What moral obligation do you have to those who willfully refuse to open their eyes and deem you mad for seeing?
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
The appreciation of the connoisseur is the highest pleasure of the artiste.
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
Does something truly speak to me from beyond the void, or is it merely my own desire?
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
“Genius such as yours is a genetic gift.”
“So I have heard from my parents.”
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
At that moment, I do now truly believe, the deed was done, in the sense that the decision of the will is the true essence of the act.
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
Even now, I cannot decide whether I was foolish dupe or noble and tragic lover. Or whether the two are one and the same.
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
Was not the arbitrary distinction between illusion and reality the ultimate illusion itself?
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
I could not deny that my spirit was amorally attracted to this ultimate temptation as my conscience was morally repelled by it.
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
“If the path exists for spirit to transcend this sorry scheme of things entire, vraiment, it must exist for all.”
Or for none at all, I thought, but deigned not to voice.
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
Beneath all this gaiety and baroque complexity lay the simple and so carefully denied: beyond the thin metal surrounding us was the endless humorless void. Hollow rings the laughter of orphans in the night.
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
Social morality requires a shared matrix of communal reality to which to relate thought and deed, and the illusion of an objective ethical esthetic requires at the very least the conviction that objective reality is more than a contradiction in terms.
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
For truth be told, I was tormented by perceptions and their corollary temptation which from a social definition rendered me unsane, though from a more absolute viewpoint what I might be said to have been suffering from was an excess of insight.
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
I want to take you as close as you can get, I want to feel your ecstasy as you feel mine, I want to bridge the final gap between us, I want us to come together in a place where each can know the other does not lie.
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
Here, in the company of the mindless trees, the free-flying birds, the bugs and frogs that passed from stimulus directly to response without the interval of consciousness between, did I hope to lose myself in the living mandala of evolution’s less self-tortured forms.
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)
True civilization consists precisely of conventions, rituals, and modes of oblique communication whereby the chaos within and the void without may be expressed and contained within the harmonious consensus of shared social objectivity, thus maintaining our bubble of crafted reality, the necessary illusion.
The Void Captain's Tale (1983)