Sublime

schadenfreude

The place wasn’t at all what she had expected from an intelligence agency for the whole world; it reminded her more of a place where byzantine plots were hatched through whispers.

torus-shaped

There was considerable confusion in both armies; the Eightieth Marlabardian Corps, for instance, maintained that the whole concept of “enemy” needed to be more clearly defined, as it was full of logical contradictions and might even be altogether meaningless.

Only the imagination can get us out of the bind of the eternal present, inventing or hypothesizing or pretending or discovering a way that reason can then follow into the infinity of options, a clue through the labyrinths of choice, a golden string, the story, leading us to the freedom that is properly human, the freedom open to those whose minds c

Of flaming jungles of combustion and mysterious vortices there was not a sign, nor had anyone ever heard of them, for the desolate waste was a place of tedium, and tedious in the extreme, by virtue of the fact that it was desolate, and a waste.

him in a different machine – cut him and

When the doctor had left, Luo Ji sat motionless on his bed for a long while, mumbling to himself, “A joke. An ancient joke.” Then he began laughing, silently at first, and then in great guffaws, trembling on his bed and frightening Xiong Wen, who wanted to call the doctor.