A Stranger In A Strange Land

A Stranger In A Strange Land

-The Planets- 

"Where should he start? When he had left home,enfolding these others who were now his own nestlings? Or simply at his arrival in this crushed space? He was suddenly assaulted by the lights and sounds of that arrival, feeling it again with mind-shaking pain. 

No, he was not yet ready to cherish and embrace that configuration-back! back! back beyond his first sight of these others who were now his own. Back even before the healing which had followed his first grokking of the fact that he was not as his nestling brothers . . . back to the nest itself."

"None of his thinkings had been in Earth symbols. Simple English he had freshly learned to speak, but much less easily than a Hindu uses it to trade with a Turk. Smith used English as one might use a code book, with tedious and imperfect translation for each symbol.

Now his thoughts, pure Martian abstractions from half a million years of wildly alien culture, traveled so far from any human experience as to be utterly untranslatable."

"This special meaning for "red" did not trouble Mike; he knew before he reached Earth that every English word held more than one meaning. It was a fact one could get used to, without grokking, just as the sameness of all girl faces could be gotten used to . . . and, after waiting, they were no longer quite the same." 

"ON MARS THE LITTLE HUMAN ADVANCE GUARD were building half-buried pressure domes for the larger male & female party that would arrive by next ship. This work went much faster than originally scheduled as the Martians were uncritically helpful. Part of the time saved was spent in preparing a preliminary estimate on a very long-distance plan to free the bound oxygen in the sands of Mars to make the planet more friendly to future human generations"

-- text/fragments: "A Stranger In A Strange Land" By Robert Heinlein