Sharpie, I thought you liked Star Trek?” “I do. But I’ve seen five years of it and we’ve got our own Star Trek now.
She was relaxed with what she was – “liked herself” as Lazarus thought of it – and liking yourself was the necessary first step toward loving other people.
The Belt, for all its lonely reaches – or because of them – was as neighborly as a village. They gossiped among themselves, by suit radio. Out in the shining blackness it was good to know that, if something went wrong, there was a man listening not five hundred miles away who would come and investigate if you broke off and did not answer.
But liking cats is hard to fake to a cat person. There are cat people and there are others, more than a majority probably, who “cannot abide a harmless, necessary cat.” If they try to pretend, out of politeness or any reason, it shows, because they don’t understand how to treat cats – and cat protocol is more rigid than that of diplomacy.
Oh, I’m not offended. But when they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk dancing and advanced flyfishing, I became too stinkin’ proud to use the title. I won’t touch watered whiskey and take no pride in watered-down degrees. Call me Jubal.” “Oh. But the degree in medicine hasn’t been watered down.” “Time they called it something else, so as not to confuse it with playground supervisors.
All symbols were in Smith’s vocabulary but he had trouble believing that he had heard rightly. He knew that he was food, but he did not “feel like” food. Nor had he any warning that he might be selected for such honor.
Ownership is a sophisticated abstraction, a mystical relationship.
The capacity of humans to believe in what seems to me highly improbable.
We lived like that “Happy Family” you sometimes see in traveling zoos: a lion caged with a lamb. It is a startling exhibit but the lamb has to be replaced frequently.
You asked what Hazel would do. She’d be along her homing line, of course – and Hazel always oriented around her drive line so as to get the Sun on the back of her neck, if possible. Her eyes aren’t too good.
I spent that summer pushing an idiot stick.
Don’t be in such a rush. It just slows you down.
I was promoted to corporal. I was promoted seven times. To corporal.
Oh. I told you about that click. Daddy says that, in a dilemma, it is helpful to change any variable, then reexamine the problem. I tried to introduce a change with my bubble gum.
This went on for years, right up to the war between the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance and the Chinese Hegemony.
Come on, you apes! You wanta live forever?
A desire not to butt into other people’s business is eighty percent of all human wisdom.” “You butt into other people’s business.
I’m electron pusher by trade;.
Peace” is a condition in which no civilian pays any attention to military casualties which do not achieve page-one, lead-story prominence.
Department of Defense” ever won a war; see the histories. But it seems to be a standard civilian reaction to scream for defensive tactics as soon as they do notice a war. They then want to run the war – like a passenger trying to grab the controls away from the pilot in an emergency.