Charles Sheffield

You can learn more about a person by watching them eat one meal than by listening to them speak for a whole day.

It was improbable for him to meet his old friends here? Fine, so it was improbable; but it had happened. “Improbable” was something you could only apply to future events.

The partners were there; gravity was calling the changes, and the cosmic dance was ready to begin.

A thousand friends have less weight than a single enemy.

He was a professional trouble-shooter. That was a fancy name for an idiot.

Arabella Lund had been full of “rules,” and one of her most basic was this: Anything in the universe can happen once, or at least it can seem to happen. If you want to obtain information, make it happen again.

The bad thing about being a world-class worrier was that being right was worse than being wrong.

In the old words of wisdom, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and that’s usually enough to get by.

Don’t confuse caution with cowardice.

When you had little or no information, it was unreasonable to have any expectations. But somehow you did, even if they were often wrong.

The limits we assign to Nature sometimes define our own lack of imagination.

We're all here," said Louis Nenda's voice.
"Where's here? Can you see?"
"Not a thing. Black as a politician's heart.

The prevailing theory to resolve this paradox comes from limited studies of Lo’tfian physiology. The male brain, it is believed, is highly organized and possesses powerful intelligence. However, it contains an unknown physical inhibitor, chemical in nature, that forbids the employment of that intelligence when in the presence of a Lo’tfian female. Confronted by such a female, the reasoning ability of the male Lo’tfian simply switches off. (A much weaker form of this phenomenon has been attributed to other species. See Human entry of this catalogue.) —From the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients)

When you have something to do, do it. When you have nothing to do, sleep.

Once you were committed to a course of action, you didn’t waste your time looking back and second-guessing the decision, because every action in life was taken on the basis of incomplete information. You looked at what you had, and you did all you could to improve the odds; but at some point you had to roll the dice—and live or die with whatever you had thrown.