Convergence

Improbable as it seems, I think she admires you more than me.

When a person was so consistently wrong, it was time to give up having opinions.

His mind was as furiously active as his hormones.

Happy endings were for children’s stories and fool. You live in misery, and then you die. Life, by definition, was not designed to end happily.

Louis continued aft. No happy ending, then. That was a fact, certain as death itself. He was living at the moment in a dream, an imagined world where everything went right.

But—dreams are real while they last. Could you say more of life?

A dream sequence was no more than a happy interlude, but maybe a happy interlude could last for an awful long time.

Nothing in life produce a more powerful joy than a near miss by the Angel of Death.

One form of insanity bears the name curiosity.

Logic was good, but too much logical analysis inhibited action. Darya had heard it seriously suggested that the original human cladeworld, Earth, had degenerated to an ineffectual backwater of a planet because computer trade-off analysis had increasingly been used as the basis for decision making. On purely logical grounds, no one would ever explore, invent, rejoice, sing, strive, fall in love, or take physical and psychological risks of any kind. Better to stay in bed in the morning; it was much safer.

He was a professional trouble-shooter. That was a fancy name for an idiot.

He realized a profound truth: there is no one so generous as a bureaucrat spending other people’s money.

Are we perhaps guilty of temporal chauvinism, believing that our own time is uniquely important, as all generation tend to think that their time is of unique importance?

Trouble comes in a thousand different ways. Not usually anything you expect, either. That’s why it’s trouble.

Theories were a dime a dozen. The partition that separated science and wishful thinking was evidence: observations and firm facts.

“How did you do that?”

The Hymenopt inclined her head. “With respect, Professor Lang, great intellectual power, even at the level you possess it, is not always a substitute for humble practical experience.”

“Professor Lang’s important work, with all due respect, does not answer that question.”

The knife, sliding in hidden behind the compliment. “With all due respect” meant “with no respect at all.”

Didn’t anything scare the two aliens? Sometimes she wondered if humans were the only beings in the universe with a sense of cowardice (be charitable, and call it and instinct for self-preservation).

Science wasn’t a show-business talent, conducted in large halls and decided by audience applause.

His sin was something that scientists had done for thousands of years. Scientists didn’t usually change data, not unless they were outright charlatans. But when facts didn’t agree with theory, there was an awful temptation to find reasons for rejecting the offending data and and hanging on to the theory. Ptolemy had done it. Newton had done it. Darwin had done it. Einstein had done so explicitly.