In the combined names of Social Intercourse, Meeting Interesting People, and Getting Out of a Rut, I have taken, in my time, some ...terrible beatings. I have listened to poets rendering their own odes. I have had the plots of yet unwritten plays given me in tiniest detail, I have assisted in charades, I have been politely mystified by card tricks, I have even been sent out of the room and been forced, on my return, to ask the assembled company such questions as I hoped might reveal to me what Famous Character in Fiction they represented. I have spent entire evenings knee-deep in derry-down-derries, listening to quaint old English ballads done without accompaniment; I have been backed into cold corners by pianos while composers showed me how that thing they wrote three years before Gershwin did "The Man I Love" went; I knew a young man who has an inlaid ukelele. You see these gray hairs? Well, making whoopee with the intelligentsia was the way I earned them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let's start with the three fundamental Rules of Robotics.... We have: one, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inact...ion, allow a human being to come to harm. Two, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. And three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From three to six months, most babies have settled down enough to be fun but aren't mobile enough to be getting into trouble. This... is the time to pay some attention to your relationship again. Otherwise, you may spend the entire postpartum year thinking you married the wrong person and overlooking the obvious--that parenthood can create rough spots even in the smoothest marriage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly lik...eable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...we were at last in Monte Cristo's country, fairly into the country of the fabulous, where extravagance ceases to exist because ...everything is extravagant, and where the wildest dreams come true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn't yet... appeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How often should a woman be pregnant? Continually, or hardly ever? Or must there be a certain number of pregnancy anniversaries es...tablished by fashion? What do you, at the age of forty-three, have to say on the subject? Is it a fact that the laws of nature, or of the country, or of propriety, have ordained this time of life for sterility?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Three little kittens They lost their mittens,... And they began to cry, Oh, mother dear, We sadly fear Our mittens we have lost. What! lost your mittens, You naughty kittens! Then you shall have no pie.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »