Books: Best Of

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

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

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

Sometimes, feeling happy like this, she imagined a baby deer trembling in the woods.

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.

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.

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

Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.