Well, we’re all young once, Prentice, and those that are lucky get to be old.
I suppose it has gone out of fashion and they are out spraying slogans on walls, sniffing glue or trying to get laid.
That’s the thing about a good porter”–and he shrugged, or shook his head and sounded so rueful and sort of growly as he said, “Deals with all your baggage.
Whatever; if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s machines that talk back: SILENCE!
Sometimes, when I have to make precious substances such as toenail cheese or belly-button fluff, I have to go without a shower or bath for days and days; I hate doing this because I soon feel dirty and itchy, and the only bright thing about such abstinence is how good it feels to have a shower at the end of it.
Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.
They were here, and then they weren’t, and that was all there was.
He walked through the white corridors, past the notice-boards with their offers of small rooms and old cars, past the coffee bar where people sat at tables, past a hole in the white floor where an old chair stood sentry over an opened conduit in which a torch shone and a man crawled, and as he left he looked at his watch:.
My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea.
Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you’re not doing it right.
The way to a man’s heart is through his chest!
Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you’re told you deserve whatever you get.
Thing about emergencies,” he said, sounding weary. “Rarely occur when they’d be convenient.
Strange that people are happy to adopt epithets they would fight to the death to throw off had they been imposed.
All reality seemed to hinge on those infinitesimal bundles of meaning.
You could find out most things, if you knew the right questions to ask. Even if you didn’t, you could still find out a lot.
It was not so difficult to understand the warped view the Azadians had of what they called “human nature” – the phrase they used whenever they had to justify something inhuman and unnatural.
One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.
Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.
One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.