You're saying nothing lasts forever, he heard the fellow whine. (Well, pretty trite, he thought.)No, he heard her say. I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exce...
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish...
From up here they could see for hundreds of kilometres across Frettle Plate. The system’s star, Lacelere, was still rising and slowly yellowing to full brightness, shining through the continents of ai...
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...
All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be a...
Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.
It was a warship, after all. It was built, to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of w...
I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away.
That’s why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place. He
All was the game, everything was seen in its light, translated into the combative imagery of its language, evaluated in the context its structure imposed upon the mind.
[T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered.
We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it.
Though drones, avatars and even humans are one thing; the loss of any is not without moral and diplomatic import, of course, but might be dismissed as merely unfortunate and regrettable, something to...
Strange that people are happy to adopt epithets they would fight to the death to throw off had they been imposed.
Zakalwe, in all the 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...
There has seldom if ever a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of t...
The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try...
The Sublime. The almost tangible, entirely believable, mathematically verifiable nirvana just a few right-angle turns away from dear boring old reality: a vast, infinite, better-than-virtual ultra-exi...
The History Of The Universe In Three WordsCHAPTER ONEBang!CHAPTER TWOsssssCHAPTER THREE
Socialists, charity workers, carers, people who volunteer to help others; they're all - and he's quite convinced about this - they're all in reality mean-spirited bastards, either self-deceiving basta...