Each day means a new twenty-four hours. Each day means everything’s possible again. You live in the moment, you die in the moment, you take it all one day at a time.
“i felt her absence. it was like waking up one day with no teeth in your mouth. you wouldn’t need to run to the mirror to know they were gone”
Dr. Dillingham was forty-one years old: a conservative, successful twentieth-century bachelor prosthodontist. His acquaintances thought him unimaginative; his patients thought he overcharged; his pretty assistant was secretly in love with him.
“Remember the tooth!” Yueh hissed. “The tooth!”
Like a t-shirt and cargo pants is any protection against the monsters that still pace, licking their teeth, waddling urgently away from my stones. What do they eat, when they’re not trying to eat me? Each other? Fish? Their short, mean teeth look like they could bite through any of those armored buggers.
“Thirty white horses, on a red hill; First, they champ. Then they stand; the, they stand still.”
“Uh… Teeth? … TEETH!
Yes! my precious!
But we, we… we only have… NINE.”
Do not irk or trifle with me! I possess but one tooth, oh, yes, for the rest were buried long ago in the flesh of sinners. Behold my jaws, upper and lower in righteous, symmetrical poverty.
No. Not now. Not ever. Do you hear me? I will use every cannon, every bomb, every bullet, every weapon I have down to my own eye teeth to end you! I swear it! I’m coming for all of you!
You pass me by. You leave me rot like a dog. You leave me die, Vorga … Vorga-T:1339. No. I get out of here, me. I follow you, Vorga. I find you, Vorga. I pay you back, me. I rot you. I kill you, Vorga. I kill you filthy.
Misuse of power is the fatal sin. The law cannot be a tool of vengeance, never a hostage, nor a fortification against the martyrs it has created.
I assure you the law isn’t a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather…the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it-very loose, the line of the law-so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are always-short of the blantant theft or cold-blooded murder-safely on the right side.
I never broke the law! I AM THE LAW!
We are afraid, but we do not talk of fear. We have many deep thoughts and doubts, but we do not speak them. We say, “Justice”; we say, “The Law”; we say, “We, the people”; we say, “The State.”
Rom is an enemy of the state, and enemies of the state do not deserve mercy.
Captain, it seems we have a common enemy. I hope that means we can work together.
Without trust there’s no cooperation. And without cooperation there’s no progress. History stops.
“Honor comes to he who acts with honor,” Anaasa yowled back through her translator. “When farshatok call, their war brothers must answer, for if my claws guard not your back, whose claws shall guard mine?”
There is no honor. Freedom without honor is meaningless.
His father used to tell him that you can’t eat principles. And no, you couldn’t. But you could live by them.
“I lack his way with words. I must use the insults I know, even at the risk of diluting them.” Zhaarnak straightened. “At any rate, the time for words is past. We will speak to the Bahgs in another language when we arrive at Planet I.”