Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a good short story writer learns to include only the most essential information.
Inside us there is a place that is our true self.
Think like a machine instead of a boy.
He was much more useful as a name and a story than he would ever be as an inconvenient flesh-and-blood person.
Knowing at the same time that whatever people pretend to be, they become.
No system works well unless good people do their jobs with integrity, and then almost any system works well enough.
We have special voices for different people; our attitudes, our moods change depending on whom we are with.
Once you get a storm started, it’s mighty hard to slow it back down again.
Everybody has his talent, everybody has his gift from God, and we go about sharing gifts with each other, that’s the way of the world, the best way.
Good-bye, Eros, and all the soldiers on it, the ones who fought for me and the other children, the ones who manipulated us and lied to us for the good of humanity, the ones who conspired to defame me and keep me from returning to Earth, all of you, good and bad, kind and selfish, good-bye to you, I am no longer one of you, neither your pawn nor your savior.
Focus too closely on the goal you haven’t accomplished, and you’ll fail to notice the victories you achieve along the way.
Darlin’, said Leslie, ’everybody on earth stays alive day to day solely because everyone they meet decides, every single day, not to kill them...
How do men become manly, if not by putting it on as an act until it becomes habit and then, finally, their character?
She discovered, as many a living being had discovered, that rational decisions are far more easily made than carried out.
Never believe a rumor of my death,′ said Peter. ‘I have as many lives as a cat. Also as many teeth, as many claws, and the same cheery, cooperative disposition.
He sat upon the hill, a Gatefather who was now but a shadow of himself, and wept. For all his crimes he wept, for all who had died before he could save them, for the mages he had stripped of power even more utterly than he had been stripped today. I held their outselves in my hearthoard for a thousand years, some of them, or more I made myself the thief of hearts, and now I am repaid.
In fact she’s a Baptist, which is almost like being Christian, only louder.
When the people elected a president like this one, who ran a campaign like the one he ran, it was hard to imagine what kind of scandal might bring him down.
We are the beasts that scheme, the predators that predict. We live by the lie, not by the truth; we study the truth only to shape more convincing lies that will bend other people to our will.
It was a strange, exhilarating feeling to be with people who didn’t want anything from you except your happiness, who were glad just to have you around.
And yet they obey and will continue to obey the orders that come to them. As in the famous Charge of the Light Brigade, these soldiers give up their lives, trusting that their commanders are using them well. While we sit safely here in these simulator rooms, playing an elaborate computer game, they are obeying, dying so that all of humankind can live.