Dune (Dune #1)

by Frank Herbert

“Where are they located?” Halleck asked. “The answer to that question,” Hawat said, “is invariably: ‘Liet knows.’”

“Someday I’ll catch that man without a quotation and he’ll look undressed,” the Duke said.

It ended up in confusion, Paul thought, staring at the backs of the last men to leave.

can the Baron object if something is destroyed which he cannot openly admit that he has?”

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh.

“Nothing wins more loyalty for a leader than an air of bravura,” the Duke said. “I, therefore, cultivate an air of bravura.”

“Power and fear,” he said. “The tools of statecraft.

“He shall know your ways as though born to them.”

So soft! he thought.

“Properly suited, your forehead cap tight, all seals in order, your major water loss is through the palms of your hands,” Kynes said. “You can wear suit gloves if you’re not using your hands for critical work, but most Fremen in the open desert rub their hands with juice from the leaves of the creosote bush. It inhibits perspiration.”

And the Duke thought: “…my climate!”

If there’s a relationship between spice and worms, killing the worms would destroy the spice.

Kynes frowned. The child kept asking adult questions.

“Bless the Maker and His water,” Kynes murmured. “Bless the coming and going of Him. May His passage cleanse the world. May He keep the world for His people.”

Will someone try chaumurky tonight—poison in the drink? Or will it be chaumas—poison in the food?

He remembered open water and waves—days of grass instead of sand—dazed summers that had whipped past him like windstorm leaves.

“Here I am and here I remain!” he barked.

“Do not make the error of considering my son a child,” the Duke said. And he smiled.

You are dealing, you see, with the Law of the Minimum.” She heard the testing quality in his voice, said, “Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. And, naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate.”

Tansley Effect—small-unit

He’s boasting, Jessica thought. He shouldn’t boast. No person who’ll be sleeping far below ground level this night as a precaution against lasguns has the right to boast.

schlag skin,

Do you wrestle with dreams? Do you contend with shadows? Do you move in a kind of sleep? Time has slipped away. Your life is stolen. You tarried with trifles, Victim of your folly.

“A column of smoke by day, a pillar of fire by night.”

And his flesh was too well firmed with water.

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife—chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: “Now, it’s complete because it’s ended here.”

“So that’s the great Red Duke.”

Only the Emperor calls the Atreides the Red Dukes.

Who would think of reviving artillery in this day of shields?

A pity to waste such fighting men as the Duke’s, he thought. He smiled more broadly, laughing at himself. Pity should be cruel!

“So join her,” the Baron repeated. But his words were like a weak echo.

Quite suddenly, the Baron’s mind could conceive of nothing more beautiful than that utter emptiness of black. Unless it were white on the black. Plated white on the black. Porcelain white.

And the Baron thought: Yes! See him there, this man who believes he cannot be bought. See him detained there by a million shares of himself sold in dribbles every second of his life! If you took him up now and shook him, he’d rattle inside. Emptied! Sold out! What difference how he dies now?

One thought remained to him. Leto saw it in formless light on rays of black: The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes. The thought struck him with a sense of fullness he knew he could never explain.

Chance and the warning in a dying man’s gasp—these had saved him.

And I must send at once to Tleielax for a new Mentat.

Something had happened to his awareness this night—he saw with sharpened clarity every circumstance and occurrence around him. He felt unable to stop the inflow of data or the cold precision with which each new item was added to his knowledge and the computation was centered in his awareness. It was Mentat power and more.

His mother, he knew, had turned, expected to meet a lasgun in the hands of Harkonnen mercenaries, and had recognized Duncan Idaho leaning out the ’thopter’s open door shouting: “Hurry! There’s wormsign south of you!”

He had read that his father was dead, known the truth of the words, but had felt them as no more than another datum to be entered in his mind and used.

I loved my father, Paul thought, and knew this for truth. I should mourn him. I should feel something. But he felt nothing except: Here’s an important fact. It was one with all the other facts.

Halleck’s words came back to Paul: “Mood’s a thing for cattle or for making love. You fight when the necessity arises, no matter your mood.” Perhaps that’s it, Paul thought. I’ll mourn my father later…when there’s time.

“They cannot go on indefinitely risking exposure of the Emperor’s part in this.” “Can’t they?” “Some of our people are bound to escape.” “Are they?”

maker hooks,

And, mother mine, there’s a thing you don’t know and should—we are Harkonnens.”

jihad.

he thought that here he truly began an Arrakeen existence—living on reclaimed moisture from his own breath and body. It was flat and tasteless water, but it soothed his throat.

My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.

Mentat training was supposed to give a man the power to see motives.

“Does a man not know when he is worth saving?” the Fremen asked.

“Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die,” the Fremen said.