There are no good or evil plants. There are only plants.
“Keep behind me. There’s no sense in getting killed by a plant."
An intellectual carrot. The mind boggles.
Gee, I wish you folks could see this. Hey Seymour, where did you get this WEEEEEEEEEEIRD plant?
I was free climbing solo in Yosemite.
Yeah, I’ve got one just like it in my living room.
Would you believe she calls this a ‘town house’?”
“By certain values of ‘town’ and ‘house,’ the label is perfectly appropriate,” said Cachat. His tone was as relaxed and casual as his expression. “To be sure, the values are ones that should be lined up against a wall and shot.”
How could a people live like that and never discover the rights of the individual, the value of a human life?
“Just let me outside one more time. Please. Please trust me. Please.”
This was his last chance at life.
“Fifty years," I hackneyed, “is a long time.”
“Not when you’re looking back at them,” she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly.”
“So that’s about it, folks. You heard what Ed Piazza and his teachers told us. Somehow–nobody knows how–we’ve been planted somewhere in Germany almost four hundred years ago. With no way of getting back.”
“I have one question and one only,” Jay declared. “How do I know that I will be paid? Answer it to my satisfaction and give your orders.”
“I ask for nothing, master.”
“And you shall receive it. IN ABUNDANCE!”
The robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was “Plenty.”
Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely. But the convulsions that follow may wreck the body entirely.
It’s a world I’ve grown accustomed to, but one that many visitors find fairly startling, and some even find disturbing.
Tom Frost: There are no accidents. For example, I’ve been killing my own wife slowly over a period of years.
Bill Lee: What?
Tom Frost: Well, not intentionally. I mean, on the level of conscious intention, it’s insane, monstrous.
Bill Lee: But you do consciously know it. You just said it. We’re discussing it.
Tom Frost: Not consciously. This is all happening telepathically, non-consciously.
Bill Lee: What do you mean?
Tom Frost: If you look carefully at my lips, you’ll realize that I’m actually saying something else. I’m not actually telling you about the several ways I’m gradually murdering Joan.
“As for my personal security and safety among a bunch of ex-terrorists, you might want to recall just exactly what the Aprilists were. I was a senior member of the Aprilists, Leslie. I personally killed over a dozen men and women, and InSec labeled all of us 'terrorists.”
If I’d come here as a spy, you’d have seen nothing of my ship, much less me.
“Admiral Dubroskaya, I can read the names on your ships’ hulls from here,” Zavala told her as the dusting of icons disappeared from her plot once again, “and I still haven’t shown you all of my platforms. I warn you once again that I knew exactly what your battlecruisers were before I contacted Dueñas and I have real-time data on every move you make. You can abandon ship now and save a lot of lives, or what’s left of your people can abandon what’s left of your ships when I’m done with them."
Things are a bit bogged down now, but at the risk of sounding trite, there’s always tomorrow.