James Blish

“[A]ll knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.”

“[H]er spare strange beauty was not that of a woman, nor even of a statue, but that of the Platonic absolute of which all beauty is but a shadow in a cave, cast by the Fire beyond fire.”