Yes of course I know it’s all a dream. Isn’t everything?
He would give up then and console himself with something she’d said. That you could not love what you fully understood. “Love, she maintained, was a process, not a state. Held still, it withered”.
They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave it any point or advancement...
Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We’ve spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war.
Insult, like many such feelings, is experienced in the soul of the person addressed; it is not something that can be granted or withheld by the person doing the addressing.
Willy, one of the guys at the distillery, comes up with what Oliver and I agree is the best definition of what a ‘dram’ actually is: ‘A measure of whisky that is pleasing to both guest and host.
There’s an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.
One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics.
A guilty system recognizes no innocents.
The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn’t.
Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls being polite.
As a writer, you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you’d thought of.
Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.
You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing’s a double skill, really.
Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.
The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.
All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people’s, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.
By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.
There has seldom if ever a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.
After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink.