“Spoons are excellent. Sort of like forks, only not as stabby.”
“If the same object from two different times touches itself, one of two things will happen. Either the Universe will cease to exist. Or three remarkable dwarfs will dance through the streets with flowerpots on their heads.”
“You have your milk,” he said. “Where there is milk, there is hope.”
“No milk," I said.
"No milk," said my sister.
I watched my dad think about this. He looked like he was going to suggest that we have something for breakfast that you do not need milk for, like sausages, but then he looked like he remembered that, without milk, he couldn't have his tea. He had his "no tea" face.
"You poor children," he said. "I will walk down to the shop on the corner. I will get milk.”
“The globby aliens went a very pale green. The pirates, shiny-black-hair-men, and the piranhas looked at them puzzled, seeking some kind of explanation, as did the wumpires.
"If two things that are the same thing touch," proclaimed the volcano god, "then the whole Universe shall end. Thus sayeth the great and unutterable Splod."
"How does a volcano know so much about transtemporal meta-science?" asked one of the pale green aliens.
"Being a geological formation gives you a lot of time to think," said Splod. "Also, I subscribe to a number of learned journals.”
“Are there any ponies in this?" asked my sister. "I thought there would be ponies by now.”
“I think that there should have been some nice wumpires," said my sister, wistfully. "Nice, handsome, misunderstood wumpires."
"There were not," said my father.”
“But it’s not later yet,” said Professor Steg. “It’s still now. It won’t be later until later.”
“Being a geological formation gives you a lot of time to think. Also, I subscribed to a number of learned journals.”
“How Do You Feel This Morning When You Know What You Did Last Night?”
“I opened the door. “Don’t do that,” said a green, globby person. “You’ll let the space-time continuum in.”
“All the dinosaurs have gone off into the stars, leaving the world to mammals.”
“My hands shook, but the milk did not touch the milk, and the Universe did not end.”
“And then they all sang a song called "I've Got a Loverly Bunch of Hard-hairy-wet-white-crunchers," which was an ancient dinosaur song that had apparently been written by Professor Steg's Aunt Button.”
“The person in the balloon basket said "I hope you don't mind me helping, but it looked like you were having problems down there."
I said, "You're a Stegosaurus.”
“Then [the dinosaurs] sang me a song called, "Don't Go Down to the Tar Pits, Dear, Because I'm Getting Stuck on You.”
“Dinosaurs are reptiles, sir," said Professor Steg. "We do not go in for milk.”
“Be you writer or reader, it is very pleasant to run away in a book.”
“We are pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and have been since we began drawing on cave walls.”
“Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.”
“You cannot force me to make my wishes now" She squared her shoulders and looked at him. "I've read texts.”
“When we learn to work with our own Inner Nature, and with the natural laws operating around us, we reach the level of Wu Wei. Then we work with the natural order of things and operate on the principle of minimal effort. Since the natural world follows that principle, it does not make mistakes. Mistakes are made–or imagined–by man, the creature with the overloaded Brain who separates himself from the supporting network of natural laws by interfering and trying too hard.
When you work with Wu Wei, you put the round peg in the round hole and the square peg in the square hole. No stress, no struggle. Egotistical Desire tries to force the round peg into the square hole and the square peg into the round hole. Cleverness tries to devise craftier ways of making pegs fit where they don’t belong. Knowledge tries to figure out why round pegs fit into round holes, but not square holes. Wu Wei doesn’t try. It doesn’t think about it. It just does it. And when it does, it doesn’t appear to do much of anything. But Things Get Done.
When you work with Wu Wei, you have no real accidents. Things may get a little Odd at times, but they work out. You don’t have to try very hard to make them work out; you just let them. [...] If you’re in tune with The Way Things Work, then they work the way they need to, no matter what you may think about it at the time. Later on you can look back and say, "Oh, now I understand. That had to happen so that those could happen, and those had to happen in order for this to happen…" Then you realize that even if you’d tried to make it all turn out perfectly, you couldn’t have done better, and if you’d really tried, you would have made a mess of the whole thing.
Using Wu Wei, you go by circumstances and listen to your own intuition. "This isn’t the best time to do this. I’d better go that way." Like that. When you do that sort of thing, people may say you have a Sixth Sense or something. All it really is, though, is being Sensitive to Circumstances. That’s just natural. It’s only strange when you don’t listen.”
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