Books: Best Of

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.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

You must go back and put out the fire. So when you are angry, if you continue to interact with or argue with the other person, if you try to punish her, you are acting exactly like someone who runs after the arsonist while everything goes up in flames.

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

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.

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.

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

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.