32 quotes
Only miscalculation could kill you in interstellar war. The equations were hard but they were fair.
The Tear (2008)
How do wars begin? Through affront, through bravado, through stupidity or overconfidence, through sacred purpose or greed.
Verthandi’s Ring (2007)
It was not socialism or communism or Islamism. It was romanticism. There is no more incandescent passion than love in a time of revolution.
The Dervish House (2010)
A chilly piety leaked into the air.
Desolation Road (1988)
The freefall sex? Grossly oversold. Everything moves in all the wrong ways. Things get away from you. You have to strap everything down to get purchase. It’s more like mutual bondage.
The Fifth Dragon (2014)
Ayşe Erkoç learned long ago that the secret of doing anything illicit in Istanbul is to do it in full public gaze in the clear light of day. No one ever questions the legitimacy of the blatant.
The Dervish House (2010)
Ghosts? Pah. We are the most substantial things in the world, the foundations of the present. We are memories.
Desolation Road (1988)
Profit, Empire, Industry. What was a dead lake, a few poisoned rivers, a few slagged hillsides? Priorities, that was what it was about. Priorities and Progress.
Desolation Road (1988)
The closer they come to the object of desire the more reluctant they are to grasp it. The search is the thing. The process is the purpose. The final mystery can only be anticlimactic. The story is ended.
The Dervish House (2010)
The five minutes ticked away on Limaal Mandella’s fob watch and the tension wound tight around Corporation Plaza. Rael Mandella Jr., sweating in his father’s best championship suit, was horrified to realize how few of such brief five-minute periods went to make up a lifetime.
Desolation Road (1988)
He had sworn on his father's honour, his mother's life, his brother's masculinity, his sister's purity and his prophet's beard that he would never set foot there again. God, knowing people, thinks little of honour or purity or even life, but vows made on his prophet he loves to confound.
The Dervish House (2010)
How proud he would have felt [...] to have seen those seeds germinate into a Muslim nation, a Land of the Pure. How it would have broken his heart to see that Land of the Pure become a medieval theocracy and then rip itself apart in tribal factionalism. The Word of God prophecies from the barrel of an AK47.
River of Gods (2006)