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Book: The Best of Cordwainer Smith
Quotes of Book: The Best of Cordwainer Smith
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  1. Cordwainer Smith _ The Best of Cordwainer Smith

    He looked at his dry old hand and it seemed to him that in this atmosphere, he had himself become more reptilian than human. "I am caught by the dry, drab enturtlement of old, old age," he murmured, but the voice was weak and the robots did not hear him.
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  2. Cordwainer Smith _ The Best of Cordwainer Smith

    Was that what people learned between the stars? To care for other people very much indeed and to spring upon them only to reveal love and not devouring to their prey?
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  3. Cordwainer Smith _ The Best of Cordwainer Smith

    At sixteen Helen was already famous, and at seventeen already forgotten, and very much alone.
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  4. Cordwainer Smith _ The Best of Cordwainer Smith

    There is no call for you to get tragic about it. Tragedy is easy enough to contrive. And if you want to be tragic, you can be tragic without destroying thirty thousand other people or without wasting a large amount of Earth property. You can drown in water right here, or jump into a volcano like the Japanese in the old books. Tragedy is not the hard part. The hard part is when you don't quite succeed and you have to keep on fighting. When you must keep going on and on and on in the face of really hopeless odds, of real temptations to despair.
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  5. Cordwainer Smith _ The Best of Cordwainer Smith

    She warned him, kindly enough, about manners when he forgot the simple ceremonies of eating which everyone knew, such as standing up to unfold the napkin or putting the scraps into the solvent tray and the silverware into the transfer.
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  6. Cordwainer Smith _ The Best of Cordwainer Smith

    Chang nodded sagely. "My father insisted on it. He said, 'You may be proud of being a scanner. I am sorry you are not a man. Conceal your defects.' So I tried. I wanted to tell the old boy about the up-and-out, and what we did there, but it did not matter. He said, 'Airplanes were good enough for Confucius, and they are for me too.' The old humbug!
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  7. Cordwainer Smith _ The Best of Cordwainer Smith

    It was all of this: The beat and the heat and the neat repeat of the notes which poured from the congohelium-metal never made for music, matter and anti-matter locked in a fine magnetic grid to ward off the outermost perils of space. Now a piece of it was deep in the body of Old Earth, counting out strange cadences. The churn and the burn and the hot return of music riding the living rock, accompanying itself in an air-carried echo. The surge and the urge of an erotic dirge which moaned, groaned through the heavy stone.
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