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This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying…but nobody thought so.
yet minds still yearned for other times, as always.
Eighty per cent of the volunteers died, but 20 per cent jaunted.
They were blind to a cold fact of evolution…that progress stems from the clashing merger of antagonistic extremes, out of the marriage of pinnacle freaks.
all brutes in the world he was among the least valuable alive and most likely to survive.
He was Gully Foyle, the oiler, wiper, bunkerman; too easy for trouble, too slow for fun, too empty for friendship, too lazy for love.
So, in five seconds, he was born, he lived, and he died. After thirty years of existence and six months of torture, Gully Foyle, the stereotype Common Man, was no more. The key turned in the lock of his soul and the door was opened. What emerged expunged the Common Man forever.
“It’s coming back, man. Some of it. Jaunte. I couldn’t jaunte on the Nomad, me.” “What?” “I was off my head.” “Man, you didn’t have no head left, you.” “I couldn’t jaunte. I forgot how, is all. I forgot everything, me. Still don’t remember much. I—”
conspicuous waste, on which all society is based,
Captain Y’ang-Yeovil was a member of the dreaded Society of Paper Men, an adept of the Tientsin Image Makers, a Master of Superstition, and fluent in the Secret Speech.
The Nomad was transporting twenty pounds of a substance called PyrE.”
PyrE is a Misch Metal, a pyrophore.
‘Remorseless, lecherous, treacherous, kindless villain…”’
Foyle mood
And as he passed from sight there rose up on his face the blood-red stigmata of his possession.
“Prom reality. You can’t accept life as it is. You refuse. You attack it…try to force it into your own pattern. You attack and destroy everything that stands in the way of your own insane pattern.”
“Yes, no matter how we defend ourselves against the outside we’re always licked by something from the inside. There’s no defense against betrayal, and we all betray ourselves.”
The man who upsets the morphology of society is a cancer. The man who gives his own decisions priority over society is a criminal.
“This is bigger than idealism.” “Nothing’s bigger than idealism.”
“There must always be sin and forgiveness. We’re never beyond that.”
“A man is a member of society first, and an individual second. You must go along with society, whether it chooses destruction or not.”
Why is life? Don’t ask about it. Live it.”
“Am I? I’ve handed life and death back to the people who do the living and dying. The common man’s been whipped and led long enough by driven men like us….Compulsive men…Tiger men who can’t help lashing the world before them. We’re all tigers, the three of us, but who the hell are we to make decisions for the world just because we’re compulsive? Let the world make its own choice between life and death. Why should we be saddled with the responsibility?”
“It isn’t necessary to have something to believe in. It’s only necessary to believe that somewhere there’s something worthy of belief.”
