He dallied a moment, soaking up the fresh, clean smell of the wood—he remembered a time when they’d taken a hunting cabin in the Loustrian Hills, just the two of them. The axe that came with the cabin...
Don’t you think it’s hilarious when people think they’re being terribly clever? I know I do. Just as well some of us genuinely fucking are or we’d be in a hell of a fucking state.
Contest is formative; battle is a testing, war a part of life and the evolutionary process. In its extremity, we find ourselves.Usually in the shit.
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...
At sunset above the plains of Kwaalon, on a dark, high terrace balanced on a glittering black swirl of architecture forming a relatively microscopic part of the equatorial Girdlecity of Xown, Vyr Coss...
All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy. Nothing was ever identical to anything else because it didn’...
We have found that the underdisciplined child will bump up against life eventually and learn their lessons that way – albeit all the harder for their parents’ earlier lack of courage and concern. The...
There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.
The Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational s...
Just one more species, which would grow and expand and then, finding the plateau phase all non-suicidal species eventually arrived at, settle down.
Faith is belief without reason; we operate on reason and nothing but. I have zero faith in my crew, just absolute confidence.
Bipedal, oxygen-breathing carboniform
Zakalwe, in all human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, co...
Yet at the same time there is something about her deportment which I – and I suspect most other males – find off-putting, and even slightly threatening. A certain immodest forthrightness in her bearin...
There is a saying that some foolish people believe: What does not kill you makes you stronger. I know for a fact, having seen the evidence - indeed, often enough having been the cause of it - that wha...
The swirling mist lay in the bottom of such great bowls like a broth of dreams.
The better I do the worse things get because the more I have to lose.
The Culture gives us so much, but in fact it’s only taking things away from us, lobotimizings everybody in it, taking away their choices, their potential for being really good or even slightly bad.
That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?
Subtlety, which was heading back for the