“I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.”

“The ImmortalsI killed them, but they would not die.Yea! all the day and all the nightFor them I could not rest or sleep,Nor guard from them nor hide in flight.Then in my agony I turnedAnd made my hands red in their gore.In vain - for faster than I slewThey rose more cruel than before.I killed and killed with slaughter mad;I killed till all my strength was gone.And still they rose to torture me,For Devils only die in fun.I used to think the Devil hidIn women’s smiles and wine’s carouse.I called him Satan, Balzebub.But now I call him, dirty louse. ”

“God In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls.The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled catTo him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze,Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,And he would weigh the heavier on those after.Who rests in God's mean flattery now? Your wealthIs but his cunning to make death more hard.Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking.And he has made the market for your beautyToo poor to buy, although you die to sell.Only that he has never heard of sleep;And when the cats come out the rats are sly.Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawnBut he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots,And in the morning some pale wonder ceases.Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful.Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lostOut of us, but it is as hair of us,And only in the hush no wind stirs it.And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes,And restlessness still shadows the lost ways.The fingers shut on voices that pass through,Where blind farewells are taken easily ....Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!”

“The forests were crippled, the wheat fields vanished; in place of the grass there reappeared stone and drifting sand. Men perished and moved on, the cities sank back into the sand, the dust settled over them. Thousands of years later Nordic dreamers dug up the petrified culture from the rubble and ashes. Today, the entire picture of the former paradise stands before our eyes as a spent dream which had once produced life, beauty and strength as long as a superior race ruled. It will live again and it will dream again. But as soon as races of a dreamless kind took over and attempted to realize the dream, reality vanished with the dream.”

“All right, Schwartz, tackle my mind now. Go as deep as you want. I was born on Baronn in the Sirius Sector. I lived my life in an atmosphere of anti-Terrestrialism in the formative years, so I can't help what flaws and follies lie at the roots of my subconscious. But look on the surface and tell me if, in my adult years, I have not fought bigotry in myself. Not in others; that would be easy. But in myself, and as hard as I could.”

“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.”

“All normal life, Peter, consciously or otherwise, resent domination. If the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment becomes stronger.”