On Literature: On Mazes (From Fiction to Science-Fiction)

"A mighty maze! but not without a plan [...]" (Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Man", 1733-34)

"Language gradually varies, and with it fade away the writings of authors who have flourished their allotted time; otherwise, the creative powers of genius would overstock the world, and the mind would be completely bewildered in the endless mazes of literature." (Washington Irving, "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon", 1819–1820)

"The 'romance' of space - drivel written in the old days. When you’re not blasting, you float in a cramped hotbox, crawl through dirty mazes of greasy pipe and cable to tighten a lug, scratch your arms and bark your shins, get sick and choked up because no gravity helps your gullet get the food down." (Walter M Miller Jr., "Death of a Spaceman", 1954)

"A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. [...] if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other." (Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia", 1974)

"The best maze is the mind.' (Ursula K Le Guin, "Mazes", 1975)

"Any path that narrows future possibilities may become a lethal trap. Humans are not threading their way through a maze; they scan a vast horizon filled with unique opportunities. The narrowing viewpoint of the maze should appeal only to creatures with their noses buried in the sand." (Frank Herbert, "Children of Dune", 1976)

"There is in Fantastica a certain place from which one can go anywhere and which can be reached from anywhere. We call it the Temple of a Thousand Doors. No one has ever seen it from outside. The inside is a maze of doors. Anyone wishing to know it must dare to enter it." (Michael Ende, "The Neverending Story", 1979)

"The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It's not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us." (Robert McCammon, "Boy's Life", 1991)

"The maze itself is the sum of a man's life: choices he makes, dreams he hangs on to. And there at the center, there's a legendary man who had been killed over and over again countless times, but always clawed his way back to life. The man returned for the last time and vanquished all his oppressors in a tireless fury. He built a house. Around that house he built a maze so complicated, only he could navigate through it. I reckon he'd seen enough of fighting." (The Adversary" Westworld (TV series), 2016)

"We depend on nature not only for our physical survival. We also need nature to show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds. We got lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating–lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems." (Eckhart Tolle, "Stillness Speaks", 2003)