Can’t machines build these faster? he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell.Why, of course! she laughed.Then why do you do it?It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doo...
Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out toward the...
Almost every developing species had a creation myth buried somewhere in its past, even if by the time they’d become space-faring it was no more than a quaint and dusty irrelevance (though, granted, so...
All you ever were was a piece of the universe thinking to itself
All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now.
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.
A very patient voice. Concerned, somehow, but a hopeful voice; a cheerful, even loving voice. He tried to remember his mother. ‘Cheradenine?’ the voice said again. Trying to get him to wake up. But he...
It was good for games. What seemed complicated became simple; what appeared insoluble became soluble; what had been unknowable became obvious. A utility drug; an abstraction-modifier;
A Mind could hold any set of facts and opinions it wanted without having to tell anybody what it knew or thought, or why.
[T]here is an osmosis from fiction to reality, a constant contamination which distorts the truth behind both and fuzzes the telling distinctions in life itself, categorizing real situations and feelin...
[He] just wants [...] forgiveness?Sma, given all the things Zakalwe’s done, just since we’ve known him, they’d have to invent a personal deity for him alone, to even start him.Sma turned away to look...
You know, Balveda, for such a sensitive species you show remarkably little empathy at times. Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot,
What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet?It would be appropriate.When in Rome; burn it.
We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they but point the way to future triumphs. But the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and...
Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underne...
The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into b...
The empire survives, the barbarians survive, but the empire is no more and the barbarians are nowhere to be found.
The Xinthia were regarded with something approaching affection by even the most ruthless and unsentimental of the galaxy’s Involved, partly because they had done much great work in the past – they had...
Once one survives the trough that comes with the understanding that people are going to go on being stupid and cruel to each other no matter what, probably for ever – if one survives; many people choo...
Money is a sign of poverty. This is an old Culture saying I remember every now and again, especially when I’m being tempted to do something I know I shouldn’t, and there’s money involved (when is ther...