But such consummate skill, such ability, such adaptability, such numbing ruthlessness, such a use of weapons when anything could become weapon . . .
But just because something does not have an ending doesn't mean it doesn't have a conclusion.
But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table. And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events? the man suggested. He smiled in response to the man’s grin, Well, yes. But then,...
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’...
All reality seemed to hinge on those infinitesimal bundles of meaning.
Ah, we’re the infection, Sma.’ He turned and sat down on the steps, looking back towards the city and the sea. ‘We’re the ones who’re different, we’re the self-mutilated, the self-mutated. This is the...
I agree we cannot yet bruit our suspicions abroad; there probably never was a proper moment for that, but if there was, the war has negated its relevance),
Silence)This from that very pit of night, naked in the wasteland, the ice-wind moaning his only covering, alone in the freezing darkness under a sky of chill obsidian:)
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...
The Fate had moved, or had been moved, thirty light years in less than a picosecond.
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...
Obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination.
No matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if...
It was the night when people got paid and didn’t have to work the next day, and so by tradition went out to get drunk and into fights. Then
It had been briefed that when Culture people didn’t speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other...
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...
You could find out most things, if you knew the right questions to ask. Even if you didn’t, you could still find out a lot.
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...
We are such pathetic, fleshy things, so short lived, swarming and confused.