The Long Earth

Modesty is only arrogance by stealth.

Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them.

But then science is nothing but a series of questions that lead to more questions.

I don’t think it's weak to admit you made a mistake. That takes strength, if you ask me.

He quite liked the English. They tended to say sorry a lot, which was quite understandable given their heritage and the crimes of their ancestors.

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

Watering down the currency of expression, causing anything to mean whatever you want it to mean, until nothing is meant and nothing is precise.

I find it best to worry about the little things. Things that can be helped by being worried about. Such as the making of clam chowder, (..)coffee. The bigger stuff, well, you have to handle that as it faces you.

But smart has to have a depth as well as a length. Some smart brushes over a problem. And some smart grinds exceeding slow, like the mills of God, and it grinds fine, and when it comes up with an answer, it has been tested.

Don’t worry! On another Earth it already happened’,

To be fucking human, to not put too fine a point on it, and Daniel Boone can kiss my ass.

So now, he hoped, here was a chance to bring mankind back into the book-loving fold. He gloated. There was still no electronics in the pioneer worlds, was there? Where was your internet? Hah! Where was Google? Where was your mother’s old Kindle? Your iPad 25? Where was Wickedpedia? (Very primly, he always called it that, just to show his disdain; very few people noticed.) All gone, unbelievers! All those fancy toy-gadgets stuffed in drawers, screens blank as the eyes of corpses, left behind. Books – oh yes, real books – were flying off his shelves. Out in the Long Earth humanity was starting again in the Stone Age.

Oh, don’t be absurd, man.' The Prime Minister sat back in his chair. 'Come on. We can’t just ban a thing because we can’t control it.' The minister responsible for health and safety looked startled. 'I don’t see why not. It’s never stopped us before.

The way I see it, my ancestors put a lot of effort into getting out of the goddamn ocean and I don’t think I should throw all of that hard work back in their faces.

But right now, as for my own philosophy, there is a quotation that rather sums it up: “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

The thought constructed itself a piece at a time, like an incomplete jigsaw. Think, don't panic.

But God also helped those who helped themselves, and presumably expected the chosen to bring warm clothing, water purification tablets, basic medication, a weapon such as the bronze knives that were selling these days, possibly a tent - in short, to bring some common sense to the party.

few bad words were said – apart from ‘Republican’, which was an extremely bad word

Surley, they couldn't be French? He tried French anyway, 'Parlay buffon say?

Songs can be very expressive, Lobsang. You can sing your homesickness.

leave me in peace to converse with my friends? Whom I promise not to kill and dissect.

All creatures on Earth have been hammered on the anvil of its gravity, for example, which influences size and morphology. So I am sceptical about finding armoured reptiles who can fly and spout flames.

But God also helped those who helped themselves, and presumably expected the chosen to bring warm clothing, water purification tablets, basic medication, a weapon such as the bronze knives that were selling so well these days, possibly a tent – in short, to bring some common sense to the party.

he was whisked away from the lines of passengers and led along corridors with the politeness you might observe when dealing with a politician belonging to a country that had nuclear weapons and a carefree approach to their deployment.

Sister Georgina had studied at Cambridge or, as she put it, 'Not-the-one-in-Massachusetts-Cambridge-Universitythe-real-one-you-know-in-England.

You ain’t the boss of me, sir, you surely ain’t. The only thing you could do right now is kill me, and you still wouldn’t be the boss of me.’ There

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”’ The

Of all their eccentricities, Sally most ferociously mocked the habit Lobsang and Joshua had developed of watching old movies in the bowels of the Mark Twain. (Joshua was glad she hadn’t been on board when the two of them had dressed up for The Blues Brothers.)