112 quotes
[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.
Axis (2007)
Since Deacon Hollingshead’s arrival in town last July the Dominion had been hard at work, cleansing New York City of moral corruption.
“Corruption” is a popular word with the enthusiasts of the Dominion, usually uttered as a prelude to the knife, the docket, or the noose.
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009)
Thus it was not money but conscience that had propelled me on this journey. Conscience, that crabbed and ecclesiastical nag, which inevitably spoke, whether I heeded it or not, in a voice much like my mother’s.
This Peaceable Land, or, The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe (2009)
He was as alone as he had ever been, frighteningly alone, in a borderless land of shaded forests and rocky, abyssal gorges. But that was all right. He didn’t much mind being alone. It was what happened when people were around that worried him.
Darwinia (1998)
These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth’s reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers.
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009)
Last week the doctor at the Tilson Rural Clinic had shown him his X-rays, the too-easy-to-interpret shadows on his liver and lungs. Guilford had declined an offer of surgery and and last-gasp radiation therapy. This horse was too old to beat.
Darwinia (1998)
Now as ever, he was startled by the wild exuberance of the twentieth century. All these lights! Colored neon and glaring filaments, powered, he had learned, but mechanical dams spanning rivers hundreds of miles away. And most of this—astonishingly—in the name of advertising.
And the hypercolony would lie. More precisely, it would say whatever advanced its interests. The distinction between truth and falsehood was irrelevant to the hypercolony, perhaps even imperceptible to it. It generated human language solely for the purpose of manipulating human behavior.
Burning Paradise (2013)
We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge—to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe.
Blind Lake (2003)
“It’s complicated, Jesse. There’s the official story. There’s the real story. And there’s the conspiracy theory.”
“Tell me the real story.”
“I would, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Well, then what’s the official story? And who declared it official?”
Last Year (2016)
“It never fails to astonish me,” Carol said. “The tenacity of love.”
Spin (2005)
All the pious high-school bullshit about the Century of Peace had been revealed for what it was: as artificial as a plastic nativity scene and as hollow as a split piñata. The world was peaceful the way a drunken coed passed out at a frat party was peaceful: it was the peace that facilitated the fucking.
Burning Paradise (2013)