16 quotes
No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.
House of Suns (2008)
Do you see us slavering for revenge, that most pointlessly biological of imperatives?
House of Suns (2008)
“Wonderful, isn’t it?”
“Wonderful and a little spooky.”
“Like all the best things in the universe.”
House of Suns (2008)
“Are you threatening me, shatterling”
“No, just indulging in a little wishful thinking.”
House of Suns (2008)
Given the evidence at our disposal, only a fool would put any faith in the organic and the machine living harmoniously for the rest of time.
House of Suns (2008)
Sorry, Campion, but we can’t trust Lady Luck any more. Lately she’s taken to pissing on us from a great height.
House of Suns (2008)
I felt a terrible sadness open inside me, a void through which the winds from the end of the universe were blowing.
House of Suns (2008)
The problem was, although I was as certain as I could be that I was right, I could offer nothing to bolster my arguments.
House of Suns (2008)
Civilisations beyond number had risen from obscurity, considering themselves masters of all creation, before fading back into the footnotes of history.
House of Suns (2008)
We were sowing so much misinformation that some of it came back and bit us.
House of Suns (2008)
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)
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)
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)
People lived and died and did strange, pointless things to themselves. So did societies, be they city-sized states or galactic empires encompassing thousands of solar systems. Everything came and went, everything was new and bright with promise once and old and worn out later, and everything left a small, diminishing stain on eternity, a mark that time would eventually erase.
House of Suns (2008)
They’re your children. The more you try to force them to be like you, the more they’re going to flare off in different directions like wild fireworks, the more they’re going to surprise and disappoint you.
House of Suns (2008)
She was usually caught with her back to us, a distant figure standing on some cliff or high building with one hand on her hip and another shielding her eyes from the sun, lost in the rapture of scale and scenery, drunk on the very idea of being human, a monkey who had hit the big time.
House of Suns (2008)