17 quotes
Tishlin’s dubious look indicated he wasn’t totally convinced this phrase contributed enormously to the information-carrying capacity of the language.
Excession (1996)
How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.
Excession (1996)
The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them.
Excession (1996)
The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.
Excession (1996)
Maybe it wasn’t anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or metaphilosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just...accounting.
Excession (1996)
There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.
Excession (1996)
He wanted to be who he was, not the person he would become if he lost the one trait that distinguished him from everybody else, no matter how perverse that decision seemed to others.
Excession (1996)
I am not being obtuse.
You are being paranoid.
Excession (1996)
I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.
Excession (1996)
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)
He was tall and very dark-skinned and he had fabulously blond hair and a voice that could raise bumps on your skin at a hundred meters, or, better still, millimeters.
Excession (1996)
Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!
Excession (1996)
She supposed she ought to feel impressed that Genar-Hofoen was sticking to his principles in the face of imminent death—and she did feel a little admiration—but mostly she just thought he was being stupid.
Excession (1996)
Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.
Excession (1996)
Even the pain of what had felt on occasion like an irretrievably broken heart had consistently proved less lasting than she’d initially imagined and expected; the revelation that a boy’s taste was so grotesquely deficient he could prefer somebody else to her always reduced both the intensity and the duration of the anguish her heart demanded be endured to mark such a loss of regard.
Excession (1996)
Here, in the bare dark face of night
A calm unhurried eye draws sight
—We see in what we think we fear
The cloudings of our thought made clear
Excession (1996)
If you have any helpful suggestions I’d be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.
Excession (1996)