Is everything normal now?”
“Well he hasn’t got religious mania, and he isn’t running around in a circle
spouting Gilbert and Sullivan, so I suppose he’s normal.” (45)

Fakat artık dünyanın ne olduğunu biliyordu: Özgürlüğün sınırsızlığıyla kuşatılmış bir hapishane..

Today, what people call learning is forced on you. Everyone is forced to learn the same thing on the same day at the same speed in class. But everyone is different. For some, class goes too fast, for some too slow, for some in the wrong direction. But give everyone a chance, in addition to school, to follow up their own bent from the start, to find out about whatever they’re interested in by looking it up in their own homes, at their own speed, in their own time, and everyone will enjoy learning.

Some readers may realize that this story, first published in 1956, has been overtaken by events. In 1965, astronomers discovered that Mercury does not keep one side always to the Sun, but has a period of rotation of about fifty-four days, so that all parts of it are exposed to the sunlight at one time or another.

Well, what can I do except say that I wish astronomers would get things right to begin with?

And I certainly refuse to change the story to suit their whims.

Well, sir to say that when the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth, is to make the assumption, usually justified, that everything that is to be considered has indeed been considered. Let us suppose we have considered ten factors. Nine are clearly impossible. Is the tenth, however improbable, therefore true? What if there were an eleventh factor, and a twelfth, & a thirteenth...

What lasts in the reader’s mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what’s it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.