Frank: I did not lose a leg in Vietnam so I could serve hotdogs to teenagers.
Kelso: ...you have both your legs, Frank.
Frank: like I said, I did not lose a leg in Vietnam.
Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.
The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.
With slow precision, he read two versions of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army marches into battle over a desolate mountain pass. The bleak and somber aspect of the rocky landscape made the soldiers feel that life itself was of little value, and so they won the battle easily. In the second, the same army passes through a palace where a banquet is in progress. The splendor of the feast remained a memory throughout the glorious battle, and so victory followed.
I changed jobs and cities, I hated holidays, babies, history, newspapers, museums, grandmothers, marriage, movies, spiders, garbagemen, english accents, spain, france, italy, walnuts and the color orange. algebra angred me, opera sickened me, charlie chaplin was a fake and flowers were for pansies.
I entered the world once more, drove down the hill past the houses full and empty of people, I saw the mailman, honked, he waved back at me.
There was a man sitting on his front porch, and the pastor came by, and they sat and talked about theology for a little while. And the pastor asked the man, if he believed in infant baptism. And the man said, "Believe in it? Hell, I've seen it done!"
"There has to be a balance, Vin," he said. "Somehow, we'll find it. The balance between whom we wish to be and whom we need to be." He sighed. "But for now," he said, nodding to the side, "we simply have to be satisfied with who we are."
“And our differences?” Elend asked.
“At first glance, the key and the lock it fits may seem very different,” Sazed said. “Different in shape, different in function, different in design. The man who looks at them without knowledge of their true nature might think them opposites, for one is meant to open, and the other to keep closed. Yet, upon closer examination, he might see that without one, the other becomes useless. The wise man then sees that both the lock and key were created for the same purpose.”
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Be warned that when we give up our 'selfish' ways in favor of altruism, we are often still driven by selfish motives. The impulse to help others might, in the end, be helping ourselves by helping close relatives or even our future descendants.
Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague rituals.
- Words of Muad’Dib by Princess Irulan – Chapter 5
[Describing a science-fiction-like photograph of a research lab.] Why did the magazine want such a picture?... Because it makes science look like a powerful and forbidding mystery, not for the likes of you and me. Because it tells us that only people with expensive and incomprehensible machines can discover the truth, about human beings or anything else, and that we must believe whatever they tell us. Because it turns science from an activity to be done into a commodity to be bought. Because it prevents ordinary human beings from being the scientists, the askers of questions and seekers and makers of answers that we naturally and rightfully are, and makes us instead into science consumers and science worshippers.
Ten thousand times the web could be destroyed, and ten thousand times the spider would rebuild it. There was neither annoyance nor despair, nor any delight, just as it had been for a billion years.
They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.
Writing controlled fiction is called "plotting." Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however...that is called "storytelling."
Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.
Genes are the architects of life, but they are not the only architects. They interact with the environment, with other genes, and with our free will. We are not simply the sum of our genes; we are also the sum of the forces that act upon them.
Paul, on trial and hooked to a lie detector, is asked to tell a falsehood. Paul says, "Every new piece of scientific knowledge is a good thing for humanity."