Somehow, later, exhausted and dismayed by these sapping, abrasive, attriting episodes, they came to a sort of truce; but it was at the expense of any closeness.
One reason was that Gurgeh was speaking Eächic all the time. Flere-Imsaho was always a little dubious about trying to be so precise about human behavior, but it had been briefed that when Culture peop...
Money is a sign of poverty.
Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, dro...
It meant something to climb, to haul this sack of bones and flesh all this way, and then look, then think, then be. She could have taken a flyer here any time when she'd been recovering, but she hadn'...
I sucked that smoke in and made it part of me, joined mystically with the universe right at that point, said Yes to drugs forever just by the unique hit I got from that one packet of fags Andy liberat...
Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.
Can I cuddle up with you when you sleep? Sma stopped, detached the creature from her shoulder with one hand and stared it in the face. What? Just for chumminess’ sake, the little thing said, yawning w...
The one on the left," Worthil said, "is a male, carrying the testes and penis. The middle one is equipped with a kind of reversible vagina, and ovaries. The vagina turns inside-out to implant the fert...
A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head...
Clasp/
[I]t was really only in the generation or two before hers that the idea had started to traverse the spectrum of likelihood in the popular imagination, beginning at unthinkable, progressing to absurd,...
You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.
Well, in the end, there was no helping this. Sometimes you just had to adopt the attitude summed up by,
The drone Unaha-Closp was fully repaired. It applied to join the Culture and was accepted; it served on the General Systems Vehicle Irregular Apocalypse and the Limited Systems Vehicle Profit Margin u...
The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking's immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season.
My name,’ she said. ‘Is Rasd-Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da’ Marenhide.
It was a beautiful voice. He wanted to reply to it. But he couldn’t work out how to. It was very dark. ‘Cheradenine?’ A very patient voice. Concerned, somehow, but a hopeful voice; a cheerful, even lo...
It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders. Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civ...
He wept a little, and was proud of her, even though he knew such vicarious pride was mere sentimentality, arguably just a typically male attempt to appropriate some of her achievement for himself.