“You must learn to rule. It's something none of your ancestors learned.”
―
Frank Herbert
“We are the people of Misr,” the old woman rasped. “Since our Sunni ancestors fled from Nilotic al-Ourouba, we have known flight and death. The young go on that our people shall not die.”
―
Frank Herbert
“He’s awake and listening to us,” said the old woman. “Sly little rascal.” She chuckled. “But royalty has need of slyness. And if he’s really the Kwisatz Haderach…well….”
―
Frank Herbert
“This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow’s life. I live now for my young Duke and the daughter yet to be.
―
Frank Herbert
“My lungs taste the air of Time,
Blown past falling sands…”
―
Frank Herbert
“Piter: Ah-ah, Baron! Is it not regrettable you were unable to devise this delicious scheme by yourself?
Baron: Someday I will have you strangled, Piter.
Piter: Of a certainty, Baron. Enfin! But a kind act is never lost, eh?
Baron: Have you been chewing verite or semuta, Piter?”
―
Frank Herbert
“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic. —”
―
Frank Herbert
“My father rules an entire planet."
"He's losing it.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Another might have missed the tension, but she had trained him in the Bene Gesserit Way - in the minutiae of observation.”
―
Frank Herbert
“What a dolt my father sends me for weaponry,” Paul intoned. “This doltish Gurney Halleck has forgotten the first lesson for a fighting man armed and shielded.” Paul snapped the force button at his waist, felt the crinkled-skin tingling of the defensive field at his forehead and down his back, heard external sounds take on characteristic shield-filtered flatness. “In shield fighting, one moves fast on defense, slow on attack,” Paul said. “Attack has the sole purpose of tricking the opponent into a misstep, setting him up for the attack sinister. The shield turns the fast blow, admits the slow kindjal!” Paul snapped up the rapier, feinted fast and whipped it back for a slow thrust timed to enter a shield’s mindless defenses.”
―
Frank Herbert
“At the age of fifteen, he had already learned silence.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The Harkonnens discouraged investigation of the spice, didn’t they?”
―
Frank Herbert
“The old woman was a witch shadow—hair like matted spiderwebs, hooded ’round darkness of features, eyes like glittering jewels.”
―
Frank Herbert
“When he wanted, he could radiate charm and sincerity, but I often wonder in these later days if anything about him was as it seemed. I think now he was a man fighting constantly to escape the bars of an invisible cage.”
―
Frank Herbert
