Patience can be a means of letting matters mature to a proper state for action, not just a way of letting time slip away.
He became aware, very slowly, very gradually, that he held some impossibly complex model of the contest in his head, unknowably dense, multifariously planed. He looked at that model, twisted it. The game changed.
Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.
You’ll run out of expletives soon; I’d advise saving some for later. Not that keeping forces in reserve has ever been precisely you guys’ strong point, has it?
The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion.
By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word.
It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders.” “Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilizationally.
Sometimes I start to think I’m repeating myself, that even new games are just old ones in disguise, and that nothing’s worth playing for anyway.
If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.
That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your Off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome.
You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.
The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they’d wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages.” The avatar hesitated. It put its head a little to one side and narrowed its eyes. “How far do I have to take this analogy, Cr. Ziller?”.
Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types.
Very little matters very much and almost nothing matters greatly.
When in Rome; burn it.
My name,’ she said. ‘Is Rasd-Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da’ Marenhide.
Don’t you have a religion?” Dorolow asked Horza. “Yes,” he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. “My survival.
Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain. And what the Idirans.
In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made.
A new collection of matter and information to present to the universe and to which it in turn will be presented; different, arguably equal parts of that great ever-repetitive, ever-changing jurisdiction of being.