He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.

We'd been apart so long--I'd been dead so long," she said in English. "I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that." "My life is nothing but room for you." I said. "It could never be filled by anyone but you.

He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in juicy protest.

Words may deeply wound us, but we must run that risk to be free.

Of course, socialism is just evil now. It's completely discredited supposedly by the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I can't help noticing that my grandchildren are heavily in hock to Communist China now which is evidently a whole lot better at business than we are.

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones.