183 quotes
Clavain felt little in the way of regret; more a sense of quiet relief that they were past the negotiating stage and into the infinitely more honest arena of actual battle.
Redemption Ark (2002)
It was a numbers game, not a guaranteed method of avoiding being killed, but Clavain had been a soldier long enough to know that this was, ultimately, what most combat situations boiled down to.
Redemption Ark (2002)
She looked at him, marvelling. “Sometimes it’s as if you’re living a century behind the rest of us.”
“Elephants don’t care what century it is. They care what season it is.”
Blue Remembered Earth (2012)
She was pointing into the empty, angel-less heavens beyond.
Everything else. The universe.
Terminal World (2010)
We don’t aspire to genetic unity, no matter what your propagandists think. The pursuit of optima leads only to local minima. We honour our errors. We actively seek persistent disequilibrium.
Galactic North (2006)
This is a kindness, a thing done to another human being for no reason other than compassion. A private, dignified act of basic human decency, which history, being the bastard that it is, will probably neglect to commemorate.
On the Steel Breeze (2013)
There were choices to be made, harder choices than I would have liked, and I realised that I had been neglecting them because of their very difficulty.
Redemption Ark (2002)
“I gather you were all too busy killing each other.”
“That’s a fairly reductive summary of our history, but I don’t suppose it’s too far from the truth.”
Chasm City (2001)
If my years as a shatterling had taught me anything, it was that not all questions had answers. Societies had reduced themselves to radioactive dust because they could not accept that single unpalatable truth.
House of Suns (2008)
The simple fact was that she no longer hated them as a matter of principle. It was also a source of shameful amazement that she could ever have wasted so much energy on groundless prejudice, when acceptance and tolerance would have been the easier, even the lazier, course.
Century Rain (2004)
I was born in a house with a million rooms, built on a small, airless world on the edge of an empire of light and commerce that the adults called the Golden Hour, for a reason I did not yet grasp.
House of Suns (2008)
Goma shook her head. “No. We don’t speak of souls. Not now, not ever. Souls aren’t real.”
“Patterns, then. Abstract structures of experience and reaction, making up a consistent, continuous human identity.”
Poseidon's Wake (2015)
But make no mistake. My counterpart is capable of a great deal of ruthlessness in pursuit of a just cause. He believes he has right on his side. And men who think they have right on their side are always the most dangerous sort.
Redemption Ark (2002)
That was my plan. But there is an old saying about plans and war.
I would have done well to heed it.
Belladonna Nights and Other Stories (2021)
Once, they would have meant something to Svetlana, but now all she felt was a faint prickly of recollection. Fluency with mathematics—in the context of any kind of engineering discipline or physical science—was a use-it-or-lose-it skill.
Pushing Ice (2005)
Clavain had been a soldier. He had killed more people than he could remember, even though those days had been a long time ago. It was really a lot less difficult to do when you had a cause to believe in.
Galactic North (2006)
Maps had never really been his thing, even during his days under Scorpio in Chasm City. There, it had hardly mattered. Blood’s motto had always been that if you needed a map to find your way around a neighbourhood, you were already in trouble.
Absolution Gap (2003)
There had been a human soul in that skull only a few hours earlier, and now no authority in the universe could bring her back. We were like monkeys sitting around a fire that had just extinguished, wondering why the warmth and light had gone away.
House of Suns (2008)
“All right, Marius—I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it, filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate onetime pad and wrote a fucking two-hundred-page report on it. Satisfied?”
“I’m never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn’t in my nature.”
Galactic North (2006)
I’m not asking you to open your mind to all manner of nonsense, Doctor, merely to allow for the possibility of things you might previously have dismissed, or failed to give any consideration to whatsoever. Such as the fact that the world was not always this way, and by implication doesn’t have to be this way in the future.
Terminal World (2010)