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j-august · 21 hours
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The voice was baritone and with exquisite control. It managed to dismiss him while greeting him.
Frank Herbert, Dune
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j-august · 2 days
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He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future.
Frank Herbert, Dune
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j-august · 3 days
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"There's a Bene Gesserit saying," she said.
"You have sayings for everything!" he protested.
"You'll like this one," she said. "It does: 'Do not count a human dead until you've seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.'"
Frank Herbert, Dune
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j-august · 4 days
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In grasping the present, he felt for the first time the massive steadiness of time's movement everywhere complicated by surging currents, waves, surges, and countersurges, like surf against rocky cliffs.
Frank Herbert, Dune
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j-august · 5 days
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"Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear's path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
Frank Herbert, Dune
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j-august · 6 days
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"Justice?" The Duke looked at the man. "Who asks for justice? We make our own justice."
Frank Herbert, Dune
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j-august · 7 days
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I'm the well-trained fruit tree, he thought. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me - all bearing for someone else to pick.
Frank Herbert, Dune
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j-august · 8 days
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He understood terrible purposes. They drove against all odds. They were their own necessity.
Frank Herbert, Dune
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j-august · 9 days
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Even in the twenty-second century, no way had yet been discovered of keeping elderly and conservative scientists from occupying crucial administrative positions. Indeed, it was doubted if the problem ever would be solved.
Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama
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j-august · 10 days
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Agnes's vanity. Agnes's extravagance. They didn't know. Appearance was the discipline that kept me going.
Mary Kelly, Due to a Death
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j-august · 11 days
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I had to go back to the beginning; though there is never a beginning, only a point when you wake up.
Mary Kelly, Due to Death
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j-august · 12 days
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We drove out of the lay-by, heading for Gunfleet. Gunfleet, below the last contour line, lapped by the river, sequestered in trees, half a mile from the road, cut off by the fringes of Shayle and Culham by two huge horns of the alluvial flats; a decaying village, a single street stricken since Trafalgar, an air lock in time: Gunfleet, where I lived.
Mary Kelly, Due to a Death
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j-august · 13 days
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Judith Appleby, as it happened, had heard of Splaine Croft. Two of her friends had sent sons there, and had reported with satisfaction that it seemed a fairly civilized sort of place. It was funny how, as civilization seeped away, the idea of civilization became all the go. She rather distrusted it. People now said 'a civilized chap' where she herself would have been prompted to say 'rather a smooth type'.
Michael Innes, Hare Sitting up
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j-august · 14 days
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And this man had told him that almost the only thing the common run of older boys now read is war books. Fictionalized accounts of war in the jungle, of savage guerilla fighting, of men driven to starvation and the verge of madness in prison camps: these easily headed the list. Pleasure was an ambiguous word, surely, to apply to what they got from such stuff. It looked as if the little boys with their bombs and the big boys with their paperbacks alike were trying to get rid, in fantasy, of kinds of fear, of horror, lodged - well, say lodged obstinately by this time in the consciousness of the race…
Michael Innes, Hare Sitting Up
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j-august · 15 days
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"Nothing really lasts, except the queer urge to make a little knowledge when one can."
Michael Innes, Appleby Plays Chicken
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j-august · 16 days
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Pettifor had fits when his pupils didn't seem to be in the forefront of his mind - a circumstance which always surprised them, for they owned all the healthy egotism of the young.
Michael Innes, Appleby Plays Chicken
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j-august · 17 days
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Miserable weather today, but I finally got my hands on the latest copy of On Spec, featuring a poem from me about cross-cultural exchange in Fairyland. Surprise! it came to me in the bath.
Buy the whole issue here!
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