Безумие – это стремление делать одни и те же вещи, каждый раз надеясь, что результат будет другим.
Может, лучшее средство от иллюзий - вообще не ждать от жизни ничего хорошего?
Свободен только тот, кому наплевать, что о нем подумают другие.
For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination.
The five ships had to accept the responsibility of carrying civilazation forward, but all they could do was to fly onward, and fly far. The spaceships would be their home forever, and space would be their final resting place.
"It doesn't matter. It's all the same."
The exact words were only a guess, because he didn't have time to finish before a powerful electromagnetic pulse arrived from three directions, vibrating Natural Selection's enormous hull like a cicada's wings. The energy in these vibrations was converted to infrasonic waves, which, in the image, looked like a fog of blood that enveloped everything.
When they looked at each other, a richness of meaning poured from their eyes just as the clouds poured from the cloud well created by the gravitational beam, endless and unceasing. But it wasn't a language of this world. It constructed a world that gave it meaning, and only in that rosy world did the words of the language find their correspondent referents. Everyone in that world was god; all had the ability to instantaneously count and remember every grain of sand in the desert; all were able to string together stars into a crystal necklace to hang around a lover's neck.
...
Is this love?
Хайс не согласился:
- Почему все начинают вставать на дыбы при одном лишь намеке на управление поведением? Вас уже программируют разными методами - от рекламы до кинофильмов. Программирование мышления - часть современного общества. Как говорит китайская пословица, вы насмехаетесь над отступившими на сто шагов, кода сами отступили на пятьдесят.
This is the difference between an ordinary scribe and a literary writer. The highest level of literary creation is when the characters in a novel possess life in the mind of the writer. The writer is unable to control them, and might not even be able to predict the next action they will take. <...> That's how a classic is made.
Twilight had fallen heavily now, and the colors of the sky had shrunk to a small space in the west, like a pupilless eyeball watching the world indifferently.