Quotes from William Olaf Stapledon

In this passionately social world, loneliness dogged the spirit. People were constantly "getting together," but they never really got there…For everyone searched his neighbor's eyes for the image of himself, and never saw anything else. Or if he did, he was outraged and terrified.

How could I describe our relationship even to myself without either disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of sentimentality?

The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe.

Gazing at the faintest and remotest of all the swarm of universes, I seemed, by hypertelescopic imagination, to see it as a population of suns; and near one of those suns was a planet, and on that planet's dark side a hill, and on that hill myself.