The Hercules Text

A man is entitled to only one great passion in a lifetime. Whether it’s music or a profession or a woman, everything else pales in its afterglow. The searing shock so changes one’s chemistry that if the object is lost, the experience can never be repeated. Only anticlimax remains.

The stars are silent.

Voyager among dark harbors, I listen, but the midnight wind carries only the sound of trees and water lapping against the gunwale and the solitary cry of the night swallow.

There is no dawn. No searing sun rises in east or west. The rocks over Calumal do not silver, and the great round world slides through the void.

It had occurred to Rimford, at about the time he approached fifty, that the chief drawback in contemplating the enormous gulfs of time and space that constitute the bricks and mortar of the cosmologist is that one acquires a dismaying perception of the handful of years allotted a human being.

Secrecy is a compulsive reflex in this country. It strangles thought, delays scientific progress, and destroys integrity.

“I can’t imagine,” said Dupre, “a better way to unnerve people than to tell them there’s no cause for alarm.”

“I suspect we would be wise,” he said without looking up, “to avoid declaring what God will or will not allow.”

He’d grown a mustache since Randall had last seen him. It was hard to understand why: He looked devious enough without it.

Politicians always seemed to be willing to sacrifice the general welfare to win votes.

We’re talking about something we all want very much to find. And that automatically makes Ed’s conclusions suspect.

Ah, Lord, if I doubt You, it is perhaps because You hide Yourself so well.

Gambini was addicted to asking the sort of ultimate questions about which one could speculate endlessly with no fear of ever arriving at a solution.