She had nearly said, “Over what?,” but at that moment she realized that if she said that she would have to listen to his reply, which would be bound to infuriate her into arguing back. It occurred to her for the first time that the only way of escaping was just not to get drawn into these arguments. If she simply did not respond this time, then she was free to leave. She tried it. She felt a sudden freedom. She left. A week later, in much the.
There was a distinct absence of anything female in the room – the same sort of absence that a missing picture leaves behind it on a wall.
Very strange people, physicists,” he said as soon as they were outside again. “In my experience the ones who aren’t actually dead are in some way very ill.
But it was the chance carelessness of it which particularly appealed to Dirk because words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.
Stanley wasn’t a good downpour. Nothing wrong with a good downpour for clearing the air. Stanley was the sort of thing you needed a good downpour to clear the air of. Stanley was muggy, close, and oppressive, like someone large and sweaty pressed up against you in a tube train. Stanley didn’t rain, but every so often he dribbled on you. Dirk.
His job was to push them open for us. He explained that this had become necessary because unfortunately the doors didn’t open automatically when you approached them, and some of their Japanese visitors would often just stand in front of them for whole minutes getting increasingly bewildered and panic-stricken until someone slid them open by hand.
It is said that there is nothing surprising about the notion of, for instance, a person suddenly thinking about someone they haven’t thought about for years, and then discovering the next day that the person has in fact just died.
I did better than that. I called in a neighbour’s kid who used to be able to solve Rubik’s cube in seventeen seconds. He sat on a step and stared at it for over an hour before pronouncing it irrevocably stuck.
He had, of course, long ago taken the precaution of removing the only extant copies of the books on his reading list from the university and college libraries, as a result of which he had plenty of time to, well, to do whatever it was he did.
Wandering around the Web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science-fiction devices that deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact it isn’t like it, it is it. Trying to work out all the implications of this is as difficult as it was for early filmmakers to work out all the implications of being able to move the camera.
It’s like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo, and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply.
Lots of people are not in the business you think they’re in. Xerox, for instance, is in the business of selling toner cartridges. All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies. Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programmes to their audience, they’re in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers.
MacDuff I knew at Cambridge.” “Oh, you did, did you? Describe him.” “Tall. Tall and absurdly thin. And good-natured. A bit like a preying mantis that doesn’t prey – a non-preying mantis if you like. A sort of pleasant genial mantis that’s given up preying and taken up tennis instead.
Odd,” agreed Reg. “I’ve certainly never come across any irreversible mathematics involving sofas. Could be a new field.
A bit like a preying mantis that doesn’t prey – a non-preying mantis if you like.
The phone rang and Janice answered it. “Good afternoon,” she said, “Wainwright’s Fruit Emporium. Mr Wainwright is not able to take calls at this time since he is not right in the head and thinks he is a cucumber. Thank you for calling.
I guess when the novel started, most early novels were just sort of pornography: Apparently, most media actually started as pornography and sort of grew from there. This is not a pornographic CD-ROM, I hasten to add.
The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors.
This Introduction to the Introduction to the New Edition is a highly significant one in the history of Introductions. Its presence on these pages means that this book has achieved the World Record for the Number of Introductions in a Book of This Nature.
The daylight shouldered its way in like a squad of policemen and did a lot of what’s-all-thising around the room, which, like the bedroom, would have presented anyone of an aesthetic disposition with difficulties.