Stranger in a Strange Land
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Human bipolarity was both binding force and driving energy for
all human behavior,
from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human
psychologists
have exaggerated this, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries,
and art galleries for the creations of eunuchs.
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Don't use that word (fantastic) to a lawyer;
straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in
law school...
In the fifteenth century the Pope deeded the Western Hemisphere
to Portugal and Spain,
and nobody cared that the real estate was occupied by people
with their owns laws, customs, and property rights. His grant was
effective, too --
Look at a map and notice where Spanish is spoken an Portuguese
is spoken.
-Ben Caxton
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I do know that the slickest way to lie
is to tell the right amount of truth - then to shut up.
-Jubal Harshaw
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He should have known better because, early in his learnings under
his brother Mahmoud,
he had discovered that long human words (the longer the better)
were easy, unmistakable,
and rarely changed their meanings, but short words were slippery,
unpredictable changing
their meanings without any pattern. Or so he seemed to grok.
Short human words were
never like a short Martian word -- such as "grok" which
forever meant exactly the same thing.
Short human words were like trying to lift water with a knife.
And this had been a very
short word.
-Valentine Michael Smith's musings on "God"
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His idea is that whenever you encounter any other grokking thing
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- he didn't say 'grokking' at this stage -
- any other living thing, man, woman, or stray
cat...
you are simply encountering your 'other end'...
and the universe is just a little thing we whipped up among us
the other night
for our entertainment and then agreed to forget the gag.
-Ben Caxton paraphrasing Valentine Michael
Smith
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Mike gives a kiss his whole attention. -Anne
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She walked up to him, stood on tiptoes, and held up her arms. "Kiss
me, Mike."
Mike did.
For some seconds they "grew closer."
Dorcas fainted.
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The Universe was a damned silly place at best...
but the least likely explanation for its existence was the no-explanation
of random chance,
the conceit that some abstract somethings "just happened" to be
some atoms
that "just happened" to look like consistent laws
and then some of these configurations "just happened" to be the
Man from Mars
and the other a bald-headed old coot with Jubal himself
inside.
No, Jubal would not buy the "just happened" theory,
popular as it was with men who called themselves scientists.
Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe--
-in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance;
the pot could not hold itself.
-Jubal Harshaw
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