You can say things which cannot be done. This is elementary. The trick is to keep attention focused on what is said and not on what can be done.
Piter spoke to Jessica. “I’d thought of binding you by a threat held over your son, but I begin to see that would not have worked. I let emotion cloud reason. Bad policy for a Mentat.” -Piter De Vries.
But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, “Well, now it’s writing time and now I’ll write.
Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.
Mood?” Halleck’s voice betrayed his outrage even through the shield’s filtering. “What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises – no matter the mood! Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It’s not for fighting.
Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.
Color streamed into a toe of darkness testing the sand.
What we should have done was test the gift first. We should have probed for dangers. We were too bedazzled by it, though.
How strange. You’re more Gowachin than a Gowachin.
It is not always the majestic concerns of Imperial ministers which dictate the course of history, nor is it necessarily the pontifications of priests which move the hands of God.
Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Better a dry morsel and quietness therewith than a house full of sacrifice and strife.
All rebels are closet aristocrats.
You don’t see much of any path unless you are Janus, looking simultaneously backward and forward.
Holiness has replaced love in your religion!
Earth? Golden Age?” Stilgar was irritated and puzzled. Why would Paul wish to discuss myths from the dawn of time?
A single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us “The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.
Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.
The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.