There was something comforting about having a vast hydrogen furnace burning millions of tons of material a second at the centre of a solar system. It was cheery.
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.
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
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.