23 quotes
I beg to differ, as those who are right have always begged to differ from those who are wrong but refuse to admit it.
Surface Detail (2010)
Your position is perverse, farcical and as intellectually demeaning as it is morally destitute.
Surface Detail (2010)
To a gun, all problems resolved into what could be shot at.
Surface Detail (2010)
I’m negotiating a tricky course between the minefield of personal honesty on one side and the rocky coast of operational security on the other.
Surface Detail (2010)
I imagine my sorrow for your loss will prove containable.
Surface Detail (2010)
There now; cynical, paranoid and pessimistic. I think that completes the set, doesn’t it?
Surface Detail (2010)
On the other hand it could have been worse. And arguably one way of making it worse would be to admit just how badly things had actually gone.
Surface Detail (2010)
Some problems were generational; you just had to wait for the relevant elders to die off and be replaced with more progressive types. With luck.
Surface Detail (2010)
That was the thing about traitors: they were people who’d already changed their minds at least once.
Surface Detail (2010)
And what was glory but something that reduced the more there were of you to share it?
Surface Detail (2010)
“I hear what you say,” Prin told him, keeping calm.… “It’s nonsense, of course, but it is interesting to know that you hold such views.”
Surface Detail (2010)
The meeting was a benign environment; potentially just as tremendously boring as war, but without the slivers of utter terror stuck in there as well.
Surface Detail (2010)
“Chay, you must be quiet now, and prepare to meet your maker.”
“I had no maker. My maker was the universe, or my parents.”
Surface Detail (2010)
Don’t you think it’s hilarious when people think they’re being terribly clever? I know I do. Just as well some of us genuinely fucking are or we’d be in a hell of a fucking state.
Surface Detail (2010)
They looked happy as zealots who’d just found a heathen to burn, Veppers thought. That was a little worrying.
Surface Detail (2010)
“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)
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)
Hell was always for other people.
Surface Detail (2010)
Lededje formed the uncomfortable impression that the other woman was trying hard to be reassuring. This had never proved to be a good sign in Lededje’s past and she seriously doubted the pattern was about to change now.
Surface Detail (2010)
I’m just puzzled why I’m here. All I can think of is you still want to know something else. Or is this just the first circle of Hell? Do I stay here for ever being bored to death?
Surface Detail (2010)