John Varley Quote

There were worlds in the jewel. There was ancient Barsoom of my childhood fairy tales; there was Middle Earth with brooding castles and sentient forests. The jewel was a window on something unimaginable, a place where there were no questions and no emotions but a vast awareness.

"In the Bowl", The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (December 1975), reprinted in The Persistence of Vision (1978)