Arthur C. Clarke · 352 pages
Rating: (22.7K votes)
“Because politics is the science of the possible, it only appeals to second-rate minds. The first raters only interested in the impossible”
“Instantly, there had been cries of protest from the industrial archaeologists, outraged at such vandalism, and from the naturalists, who pointed out that the penguins simply loved the abandoned pipeline.”
“Belief in God is apparently a psychological arti-fact of mammalian reproduction.”
“Tranquillity was not a state of mind that could be sustained for long.”
“But there was no substitute for reality; one should beware of imitations.”
“Though he had a devoted coterie of fans who subscribed to his information service—in an earlier age, he would have been called a pop scientist—he had an even larger circle of critics. The kinder ones considered that he had been educated beyond his intelligence. The others labeled him a self-employed idiot. It”
“And as for you, Paul, I assured him that you could keep a secret for up to six days without apoplexy.”
“The hypothesis you refer to as God, though not disprovable by logic alone, is unnecessary for the following reason. “If you assume that the universe can be quote explained unquote as the creation of an entity known as God, he must obviously be of a higher degree of organization than his product. Thus you have more than doubled the size of the original problem, and have taken the first step on a diverging infinite regress.”
“But the future bores me.
I imagine following it like a leaf into traffic.
I imagine eating it like a heart made of oatmeal.”
“Heartbreak was a luxury too costly for the single parent.”
“It’s all society is, the repressed sex drives of men, the objectification of women, their paranoia, the posturing, the macho stances, the beauty standard, it’s all just one charade masking a never ending hard on.”
“Ferret took out a folded scrap of paper and passed it to him.
'My guy Ben doesn't know where the other club is, but the girls are being shipped in from here, a rehab centre in Newtonville.'
'What's this other place called?' Tazeem asked as he slipped the scrap of paper into his pocket.
'The place is just known as The Club. But the behind-the-scenes bit that only the real big spenders get to see, there's no official name, 'cause officially it doesn't exist, that's know as The Zombie Room.”
“Forget dying. I suddenly wanted to inflict pain. My anger was a living, breathing thing controlling my body, making me shake. It was funny what a person with only half a soul could feel: no joy, no pleasure, no amusement, no longing or desire or fear – but they could feel anger, more keenly than if they were whole. Sharper than they ever had before they were destroyed – anger like it kept you alive, anger like air. I’d thought, many times, that it might have been only this anger that allowed me to survive at all.”
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