79 quotes
Incolore sighed. “The loyalty of the systematically betrayed. Is there anything sadder?”
The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993)
Urban life was thus founded upon the principle of deliberately confounding those who were not a part of it. Civilization was a strategy of exclusion.
Jack Faust (1997)
But the way she saw it, you only had so much organization in your life. You had to choose: Invest it in your research, or fritter it away on housework.
Bones of the Earth (2002)
Oh, Sirin, how could you? You know as well as I do how dangerous scrying the future can be. Half the time what it shows you wouldn’t happen if you hadn’t foreseen it.
The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993)
This was human glory—a sad and exhaust-darkened memorial for good citizens to ignore and drunks to piss upon on their way home from the brothels. Here was the omega-point of all ambition.
Jack Faust (1997)
“Machines!” Wyeth snorted. “Machines are the easiest things in the universe to outwit because they’re predictable—that’s their function, to be predictable, to do exactly what they’re designed for, time after time.
Vacuum Flowers (1987)
It was the kind of discovery that shatters old universes and opens up new ones in their place.
Vacuum Flowers (1987)
(Information is information, Faust. Knowledge is knowledge. I make no distinction between the high and the low.)
Jack Faust (1997)
He was not actually drunk, but emotion made him feel as if he were. Sorrow, loss, anger—these were as good as a bottle of the very worst gin.
Jack Faust (1997)
In some ways she was not a very good scientist: impatient with data, too ready to leap to conclusions, apt to judge an idea not by its merits but by its sheer niftiness.
Bones of the Earth (2002)
“Did you experience hallucinations or illusions?”
“What’s the difference?”
“An illusion is a misreading of actual sensory data, while a hallucination is seeing something that isn’t there.”
Stations of the Tide (1991)
She had learned at an early age that it was not how often you were wrong that counted in science, but how often you were right. One startling hit covered a multitude of bad guesses.
Bones of the Earth (2002)
Hierarchies only work to the benefit of those on the top. If you’re high, you’ll get by. If you’re low, out you go! That’s how it is.
The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993)
The bureaucrat was sensitive to this kind of friction. It arose wherever the moving edge of technology control touched on local pride.
Stations of the Tide (1991)
It was a scream straight from the toad buried at the base of the brain, that ancient reptile that wants everything at once, delivered to its feet and set ablaze.
Stations of the Tide (1991)
(All human beings have their price, and quite often it is surprisingly small. The trick consists of knowing exactly what that price is, when they themselves do not.)
Jack Faust (1997)
Time was a flickering gray fire constantly consuming all things, so that what appeared to be motion was actually the oxidation and reduction of possibilities, the collapse of potential matter from grace to nothingness.
Stations of the Tide (1991)
“What was all that about?”
“It’s an occupational hazard...You start by reading books, and you end by loving them.”
The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993)
(There are three stages to a battle: First you’re bored. Then you’re terrified. Then you’re dead. Each is necessary, and they must all come in the proper order.)
Jack Faust (1997)
The announcers sounded giddily excited. Their faces flushed, their eyes bright. Natural disasters did that to people, made them feel significant, reassured them that their actions mattered.
Stations of the Tide (1991)