Books: Best Of

I climbed up the Western Wall until I reached the Statue of a Woman carrying a Beehive, fifteen metres above the Pavement. The Woman is two or three times my own height and the Beehive is covered with marble Bees the size of my thumb. One Bee – this always gives me a slight sensation of queasiness – crawls over her left Eye. I squeezed Myself into

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.

Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.

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.

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.

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

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

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.