Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

In very different ways, the possibility that the universe is teeming with life, and the opposite possibility that we are totally alone, are equally exciting. Either way, the urge to know more about the universe seems to me irresistible, and I cannot imagine that anybody of truly poetic sensibility could disagree.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone — intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

and still am, suspicious of the idea of oneness. I don’t buy into the homogeneity of the human experience. I don’t think we’re all one. We can be one, but I don’t think we have to see things the same way for that to be so. An anarchic thought: We’re one but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other, not that we’ve got to, just that we get to.

The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

The result of feeling that we are separate minds in an alien,
and mostly stupid, universe is that we have no common sense, no way of making sense of the world upon which we are agreed in common. It's just my opinion against yours, and therefore the most aggressive and violent (and thus insensitive) propagandist makes the decisions. A muddle of conflicting opinions united by force of propaganda

The universe is not only stranger than we imagine; but stranger than we CAN imagine.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged (...) Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

How alone everyone is in the vast tomb of the universe!

We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universes are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.

I know I’m not myself with people, but am I myself when alone? That seems unlikely, too.

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.