185 quotes
What I know was passed to me by others, and so must surrender the toll which information tends to pay when it passes through the minds and memories of others.
Inversions (1998)
The news team, and Hamin, seemed well pleased. “You should have been an actor, Jernau Gurgeh,” Hamin told him.
Gurgeh assumed this was intended as a compliment.
The Player of Games (1988)
Perhaps my certainty is misplaced.
Inversions (1998)
They looked happy as zealots who’d just found a heathen to burn, Veppers thought. That was a little worrying.
Surface Detail (2010)
Which was more likely: what appeared to be the case, or this all being a lie, a set-up, a vast and incomprehensible joke? Discuss.
The Algebraist (2004)
He was almost unbearably attractive. Djan Seriy had therefore naturally gone instantly to what she regarded as her highest alert state of suspicion.
Matter (2008)
I have lived ten thousand years; I am used to it. Lovers dying, civilisations dying…one develops a certain god-like indifference to it all, intellectually.
The Hydrogen Sonata (2013)
The first time he saw somebody else he felt a mixture of emotions; fear, joy, expectation and a kind of disappointment that this wilderness was not his alone.
Feersum Endjinn (1994)
“You’d make a great teenage boy,” she told the avatar.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You still think girls get moist when they hear arcane nomenclature. It’s sweet, I suppose.”
Surface Detail (2010)
That’s the trouble with people like them, I suppose; whenever you think you’re detecting the first signs of them starting to behave responsibly, it’s just them being even more devious and underhand than usual.
Excession (1996)
“I was being sarcastic.”
“I know. I was seeing your sarcasm and raising you deadpan literalness.”
Transition (2009)
She hadn’t forgotten all her military training; one point she certainly recalled being taught was that anything that looked like an outrageous coincidence was probably enemy action.
The Hydrogen Sonata (2013)
Naturally, also, both sides were convinced they had right on their side, not that either was remotely naive enough to think that that had any possible bearing on the outcome whatsoever.
Surface Detail (2010)
He suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language and only ever used it to give orders.
Use of Weapons (1990)
Being spoon-fed rosy-hued misinformation by the authorities was no more than people had come to expect—and preemptively discount. They only got suspicious when presented with what looked like the plain unvarnished truth.
The Algebraist (2004)
The youth was a cretin, and didn’t even realize that he was.
He could think of no more disastrous combination.
Use of Weapons (1990)
The reaction was…mixed. Some people…hated it…others…really hated it.
The Hydrogen Sonata (2013)
We had to assume that solipsism was nonsense because otherwise everything else around us was nonsense and irrelevant, and the result of a kind of self-inflicted deceit.
Transition (2009)
Whenever one was struck by a previously unlikely-seeming idea that had come to appear plausible or even sensible, one ought to apply that test: was it inherently any more likely than solipsism? If solipsism seemed to make just as much sense, then the idea could be dismissed.
Transition (2009)
He looked up from it at the stars again, and the view was warped and distorted by something in his eyes, which at first he thought was rain.
The Player of Games (1988)