The Ships Of Earth

I do matter, and despising me was the gravest error of their lives.

Maybe what we really want is for our children to be the dominant ones! Maybe I'm trying to see my own ambitions fulfilled in them, and that would be wrong, so I should be content with what they are.

Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn't mean the rest of us do.

Wasting our time? This is a waste of time, to live in peace and plenty with my wife and children? May I waste the rest of my life, then.

Maybe he's growing up.

Or maybe he just needed the right circumstances to discover the best in himself.

The barrier was only in my mind — which is true of this barrier as well. The more firmly I try to cross the barrier, the more firmly I'm rejected. Well, maybe it's the intention to cross the boundary that pushes me away.

I acted like a human male. When I act like a human male it doesn't make me less human, it just makes me less female.

Doesn't love show its face when it satisfies the need of the loved one, for the loved one's sake alone?

You take responsibility for us all. Without ever waiting to be told.

So do all good people. That's what it means to be a good person.

To face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable.

The others are even more likely to obey their god.

Which is?

It dangles between their legs.

Show him who I am, so he will pity me instead of fearing me. And then we can turn pity into compassion, and compassion into understanding, and understanding into affection, and affection into love, and love into life, the life of our children, the life of the new self we will become together.

Physically plain people are perfectly able to see physical beauty in others, while people who are morally maimed are blind to goodness and decency. They honestly think it doesn't exist.

Oh, they know it exists all right. They just never know which people have it.

You always back off at the exact moment when you're about to tell the other person exactly what she needs to hear.

I interpreted all you did as weakness — but I should have known that it was wisdom and strength, freely shared with all of us, even the ones who don't deserve it.