But such consummate skill, such ability, such adaptability, such numbing ruthlessness, such a use of weapons when anything could become weapon . . .
Do you want to work with us?Everybody seems to think I should; they believe you’re fighting the good fight. It’s just that... I get suspicious when everybody agrees about something.
Don’t you have a religion? Dorolow asked Horza. Yes, he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. My survival. So… your religion dies wit...
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.
Genar-Hofoen had arrived a few days after the end of Tier’s annual Festival. There was an air of autumnal desuetude mixed with high-summer torpor about the place when he arrived; people were cleaning...
He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.
However, there is another reaction to the never-ending plethora of unoriginal idiocies that life throws up with such erratic reliability, besides horror and despair. What’s that? A kind of glee. Once...
I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.
I let myself into the cellar, locked the door behind me. The cellar was cold. I found the whisky, let myself out of the cellar and locked it, turned all the lights out, gave Mrs McSpadden the bottle,...
It also occurred to him that Minds wrote voluminous biographies of each other in order to cover the odd potentially valuable or embarrassing nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.She laughed. 'Really?'The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. 'Oh, no. It's just something we tell ourselves.
It never ceased to amaze him how quickly a small child's face could turn from peach to beetroot.
It was the Culture’s fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that...
I’m sure it varies across species – some seem to do quite well with no idea of love at all – but you soon enough come to realise that love generally comes from a need within ourselves, and that the be...
Just as one might do useful work without fully understanding the job one was engaged in, or even what the point of it was, so the behaviour of devotion still mattered to the all-forgiving God, and jus...
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...
SPADASSINS DIGLADIATE! ZIFFIDAE AND XEBECS CONTEND! GOL-IARD DUNKING! Slogans, signs, announcements, odours and personal greeters vied for attention, advertising emporia and venues. Stunning ’scapes a...
The empire survives, the barbarians survive, but the empire is no more and the barbarians are nowhere to be found.
The world was on fire; walls of smoke filled the sky, making a night lit up like hell, flames leaping from a hundred different places, trees and outbuildings all on fire or silhouetted against the fir...
What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet?It would be appropriate.When in Rome; burn it.
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