“Sad? Nonsense! Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.” He glanced at the charts on the table. “And Arrakis is just another place.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Seeing all the chattering faces, Paul was suddenly repelled by them. They were cheap masks locked on festering thoughts—voices gabbling to drown out the loud silence in every breast.”
―
Frank Herbert
“There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh.”
―
Frank Herbert
“It should be one of the tests,” the old woman said. “Humans are almost always lonely.”
―
Frank Herbert
“On Caladan, we ruled with sea and air power," the Duke said. "Here, we must scrabble for desert power. This is your inheritance, Paul.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The Fremen have a simple, practical religion,” he said.
“Nothing about religion is simple.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Surely not a palm lock, she told herself. A palm lock must be keyed to one individual’s hand shape and palm lines. But it looked like a palm lock. And there were ways to open any palm lock—as she had learned at school.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Can you remember your first taste of spice?” “It tasted like cinnamon.”
―
Frank Herbert
“She thought of the boy's features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns-endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus.”
―
Frank Herbert
“And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life -we went soft, we lost our edge.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem,” Kynes said, “is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.”
―
Frank Herbert
“How strange that so few people ever looked up from the spice long enough to wonder at the near-ideal nitrogen-oxygen-CO2 balance being maintained here in the absence of large areas of plant cover.”
―
Frank Herbert
“She’s the One all right,” she muttered. “Poor thing.”
―
Frank Herbert
