Dune (Dune #1)

by Frank Herbert

So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’

The Duke felt in this moment that his own dearest dream was to end all class distinctions and never again think of deadly order.

Duke Leto ... Marxist

My father was 71 at the time and looking no older than the man in the portrait, and I was but 14, yet I remember deducing in that instant that my father secretly wished the Duke had been his son, and disliked the political necessities that made them enemies.

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

They’re becoming like the men of the pre-Guild legend, she thought: Like the men of the lost star-searcher, Ampoliros—sick at their guns—forever seeking, forever prepared and forever unready.

The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right decisions.

Mind of a tyrant in a nutshell

First, though, he must make the people of Arrakis hate him. Then—they will welcome my darling Feyd-Rautha as a savior.

Feyd as false orophet

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.

We must adjust, the Baron thought. I’ll have to put Rabban over this damnable planet once more. Without restraint. I must spend my own Harkonnen blood to put Arrakis into a proper condition for accepting Feyd-Rautha. Damn that Piter! He would get himself killed before I was through with him.

I wonder if the new film will make more of this subplot

The sense of terrible purpose he’d first experienced in his ordeal with the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam pervaded him. His right hand—the hand of remembered pain—tingled and throbbed.

Hesitating, still worried by the harshness in his voice, Jessica returned to the book, studied an illustrated constellation from the Arrakeen sky: “Muad’Dib: The Mouse,” and noted that the tail pointed north.

“You’re the Baron’s own daughter,” he said, and watched the way she pressed her hands to her mouth. “The Baron sampled many pleasures in his youth, and once permitted himself to be seduced. But it was for the genetic purposes of the Bene Gesserit, by one of you.”

“You’re thinking I’m the Kwisatz Haderach,” he said. “Put that out of your mind. I’m something unexpected.”

I’ve always prided myself on seeing things the way they truly are,” Thufir Hawat said. “That’s the curse of being a Mentat. You can’t stop analyzing your data.”

Hawat’s aide spoke slowly, disbelief in every word: “You…captured Sardaukar?” “Only three of them,” the Fremen said. “They fought well.”

This should be in the new movie

golden glowglobes.

Jessica passed her hand across the door as she entered, was startled to identify plasteel.

Plasteel?

“Lad,” Kynes said, “there are things you don’t—” “You will address me as Sire or my Lord,” Paul said. Gently, Jessica thought.

The Lynch film sjould have kept more of kynes skepticism

prescient memory

“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Not himself, and no spawn of his loins. But a Harkonnen. Not this Rabban he’d summoned, of course. But Rabban’s younger brother, young Feyd-Rautha.

Not his?

“Find a place to rest and stay out of the way, child-man,” Chani said.

LOL