Gratitude and treachery are merely the two extremities of the same procession.
You have seen all of it that is worth staying for when the band and the gaudy
officials have gone by.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
The countdown had stalled at 'T' minus 69 seconds when Desiree, the first
female ape to go up in space, winked at me slyly and pouted her thick,
rubbery lips unmistakably -- the first of many such advances during what
would prove to be the longest, and most memorable, space voyage of my
career.
-- Winning sentence, 1985 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a
creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely
a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the
bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.
Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact
that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth
to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the
very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more
afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by
an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam
as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and
put him at the head of the procession.
-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
Steady movement is more important than speed, much of the time. So long
as there is a regular progression of stimuli to get your mental hooks
into, there is room for lateral movement. Once this begins, its rate is
a matter of discretion.
-- Corwin, Prince of Amber
