“The strange thing about television is that it doesn't tell you everything.”
“In meeting Betty Jo he had learned that there was a large substratum of society that was totally unaffected by this middle-class prototype, that a huge and indifferent mass of persons had virtually no ambitions and no values whatever.”
“The house was an immense place, isolated in a great wooded area. The building and the trees seemed wet, glistening dimly in the grey morning light that was much like the light of midday of Anthea. It was refreshing to his over-sensitive eyes. He liked the woods, the quiet sense of life in them, and the glistening moisture - the sense of water and of fruitfulness that this earth overflowed with, even down to the continual trilling and chirping sounds of the insects. It would be an endless source of delight compared to his own world, with the dryness, the emptiness, the soundlessness of the broad, empty deserts between the almost deserted cities where the only sound was the whining of the cold and endless wind that voiced the agony of his own, dying people.....”
“and I live alone everywhere. Altogether”
“Do you realize that you will not only wreck your civilization, such as it is, and kill most of your people; but that you will also poison the fish in your rivers, the squirrels in your trees, the flocks of birds, the soil, the water? There are times when you seem, to us, like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statuary with hammers.”
“Did they ruin your mind when they ruined your eyes, Mr Newton?’ Newton”
“little and ran away if a girl tried to touch him. Or maybe he was queer—anybody who sat around reading all the time and looked like he did… But he didn’t talk like a queer.”
“He was sick, sick from the long dangerous trip he had taken, sick from all the medicine —the pills, the inoculations, the inhaled gases — sick from worry, the anticipation of crisis, and terribly sick from the awful burden of his own weight. He had known for years that when the time came, when he would finally land and begin to effect that complex, long-prepared plan, he would feel something like this. The place, however much he had studied it, however much he had rehearsed his part in it, was so incredibly alien — the feeling, now the he could feel — the feeling was overpowering. He lay down in the grass and became very sick.”
“He began to see a kind of beauty in the strangeness of the field, too. It was quite different from what he had been taught to expect —as he had already discovered, were many of the things in this world—yet there weas pleasure for him now in its alien colors and textures, its new sights and smells. In sounds, too; for his ears were very acute and he heard many strange and pleasant noises in the grass, the diverse rubbings and clickings of those insects that had survived the cold weather of early November; and even, with his head now against the ground, the very small, subtle murmurings in the earth itself.”
“The opportunity for evil in itself does not suffice; people need a rationale as well. Consider how unpleasant, how awkward it must be when your neighbor, catching his breath (and that can happen anytime), screams, 'Why?' - or, 'Aren't you ashamed?!' It's embarrassing to stand there without a ready answer. A crowbar makes a poor rebuttal, everybody senses that. The whole trick lies in having the proper grounds to brush aside such aggravating objections. Contemptuously. Everyone wants to commit a villainy without having to feel like a villain.”
“The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it.”
“She felt like parts of her soul were missing, had left her body long ago. It had happened not in Greece three months ago, but long before that. It was in Greece that she'd realized those parts had left her and were not coming back.”
“Ciel ! Amour ! Liberté ! Quel rêve, ô pauvre Folle!
Tu te fondais à lui comme une neige au feu”
“God isn't here. God doesn't even know about this place”
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