Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the...
Meanwhile the Mind of Pittance watched over them, and looked out into the resounding silence and the sun-freckled darkness of the spaces between the stars, forever content and ineffably satisfied with...
Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn't it been clever? Yes, it had.
Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean towards the latter.
It wasn’t a finite supply of promiscuity he was draining, it was an ever-replenishing fixation that was eating up his potential for future personal growth.
In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after...
If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking amongst yourselves seemed to be the way you convinced yourself of it.
I'm too drunk to recall much of what I've said. Which, come to think of it, is probably just as well, judging by the way people who are normally quite sensible dissolve into gibbering, rude, opinionat...
I have a whole regimental intelligence service that’s developed a fine line in rumour-mongering and story-placing over the last few years, and the ear of every media player you’ve courted so assiduous...
He wasn’t sure himself why he was pulling his punches in this way, but somehow it seemed important not to let Contact know everything, to keep something back. It was a small victory against them a lit...
Gurgeh never ceased to be fascinated by the way a society’s games revealed so much about its ethos, its philosophy, its very soul.
Even as a raft, of course, it could have been made from gold, or any element with a molecular number lower than mercury. Lead would still sink in mercury, but gold shouldn’t. It was one number down th...
By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prev...
Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible pro...
Because I do enjoy winning, because I do have something nobody can copy, something nobody else can have; I’m me; I’m one of the best.
All of it dust now, all of their precious humanoid civilization ground to junk under glaciers or weathered away by wind and spray and rain and frozen ice - all of it. Only this pathetic maze-tomb left...
Just one more species, which would grow and expand and then, finding the plateau phase all non-suicidal species eventually arrived at, settle down.
Just doing nothing is a statement, don’t you understand that? What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what i...
You’ll run out of expletives soon; I’d advise saving some for later. Not that keeping forces in reserve has ever been precisely you guys’ strong point, has it?
Well, the voice said, seemingly oblivious, one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the s...