Authors:
  • It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is - since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something.

    Letter to James F. Morton (6 November 1930), in "Selected Letters III, 1929-1931" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (p. 208), 1968.