Books: Best Of

Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.

What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? ... Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might

The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated.

Our obituary writer is an extreme, pedantic gossip. He gets things wrong, but he gets them in detail.

Of course, we were careful not to throw them too hard, because when two hydrogen atoms are knocked together, click! a deuterium atom might be formed, or even a helium atom, and for the purposes of the game, such atoms were out: what’s more, if one of the two belonged to your opponent, you had to give him an atom of your own to pay him back.

When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the way of the mind.

Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.

“All people are insane,” he said. “They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he’s as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high.