When they ask how I died, I said. Tell them: Still Angry.
They’d spit in your eye and walk away if you called them victims, but somehow that same grit never found its way into any built form better than hardscrabble endurance and nonspecific rage.
There isn’t actually any escape. Once you understand this, you are empowered.
Then let me tell you something instead. When they make an Envoy, do you want to know what they do? They burn out every evolved violence limitation instinct in the human psyche. Submission signal recog...
The priest I didn’t talk to at all, because I didn’t want to have to hide his body afterwards.
The police are more impressive by night. First of all, you’ve got the flashing lights casting dramatic color into everyone’s faces, grim expressions steeped alternately in criminal red and smoky blue.
The lawyers I saw there had about as much in common with the man who had defended me at fifteen as automated machine rifle fire has with farting.
The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here—it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from...
That’s right, Dragonbane. And brothers always stood together, the buffalo came when they were called, the grass grew taller and greener, and it never fucking rained. Get a grip, old man.
Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s...
Part of running a successful tyranny is knowing when and how to let your subjects off the leash
On Harlan’s World, streetlife has a stripped-back elegance to it, an economy of motion and gesture that feels almost like choreography if you’re not used to it. I grew up with it, so the effect doesn’...
Kristin, nothing ever does change. I jerked a thumb back at the crowd outside. You’ll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don’t have to think for themselves. You’ll...
I’ve heard that said about outlanders and enemies before, and I don’t generally trust it. Just too bloody convenient, the quick and easy way to deal with difference. Oh, they’re not like us, they’re i...
It’s not an easy thing to put a gun to your own head, even if you do want to die. To do it when you want to live must take the will of a demon.
It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.
His eyes rolled in their sockets like a panicked horse's.
He picked one at random, a luridly violent far-future crime novel about a detective who could seemingly exchange bodies at will, but the subject matter was alien to him and his attention drifted. It a...
He is as corrupt as the rest of them. As all the materialists.’ ‘Yeah, but give him his due. If his daughter ever gets raped, he’s unlikely to beat her to death for dishonouring him.’ She flinched. ‘Y...
Half the things we dig up, we have no idea what they are, and we still sell them as fucking coffee-table trinkets. Right now, someone back on Latimer has probably got the encoded secret of a faster-th...