Home > Work > The Rediscovery of Man
1 " We shall take a star out of the skies and shall set thousands of worlds on fire... "
― Cordwainer Smith , The Rediscovery of Man
2 " There is no time for fear. It's much too interesting. "
3 " ... crowding together to see something which would ease the boredom of perfection and time. "
4 " ... but remember that I shall love your sorrow... "
5 " Joan commented, upon sentence, "My body is your property, but my love is not. My love is my own, and I shall love you fiercely while you kill me. "
6 " It was all of this: The beat and the heat and the neat repeat of the notes which poured from the congohelium—metal never made for music, matter and anti-matter locked in a fine magnetic grid to ward off the outermost perils of space. Now a piece of it was deep in the body of Old Earth, counting out strange cadences. The churn and the burn and the hot return of music riding the living rock, accompanying itself in an air-carried echo. The surge and the urge of an erotic dirge which moaned, groaned through the heavy stone. "
7 " Chang nodded sagely. “My father insisted on it. He said, ‘You may be proud of being a scanner. I am sorry you are not a man. Conceal your defects.’ So I tried. I wanted to tell the old boy about the up-and-out, and what we did there, but it did not matter. He said, ‘Airplanes were good enough for Confucius, and they are for me too.’ The old humbug! "
8 " Meeya Meefla, where "
9 " She warned him, kindly enough, about manners when he forgot the simple ceremonies of eating which everyone knew, such as standing up to unfold the napkin or putting the scraps into the solvent tray and the silverware into the transfer. "
10 " There is no call for you to get tragic about it. Tragedy is easy enough to contrive. And if you want to be tragic, you can be tragic without destroying thirty thousand other people or without wasting a large amount of Earth property. You can drown in water right here, or jump into a volcano like the Japanese in the old books. Tragedy is not the hard part. The hard part is when you don’t quite succeed and you have to keep on fighting. When you must keep going on and on and on in the face of really hopeless odds, of real temptations to despair. "
11 " At sixteen Helen was already famous, and at seventeen already forgotten, and very much alone. "
12 " Was that what people learned between the stars? To care for other people very much indeed and to spring upon them only to reveal love and not devouring to their prey? "
13 " He looked at his dry old hand and it seemed to him that in this atmosphere, he had himself become more reptilian than human. “I am caught by the dry, drab enturtlement of old, old age,” he murmured, but the voice was weak and the robots did not hear him. "
14 " There is no all-purpose computer built that weighs as little as a hundred and fifty pounds. You do. "
15 " So what you face is a month of being absolutely wide awake, on an operating table and being operated on without anesthetic, while doing some of the hardest work that mankind has ever found. "
16 " While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for “love,” “duty” “humanity” and “virtue”—words that happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like “I surrender” in English. He considered this act to be the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life. "
17 " Love is not proud. Love has no real name. Love is for life itself, and we have life. "
