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2224b9e
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Two of them drifted over to intercept me with the easy calm of big cats that have been fed recently.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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85ff020
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Overhead soft-bellied clouds panic toward the horizon like whales before the harpoon, and the wind runs addict's fingers through the trees that line the street.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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f0ef9e2
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In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, Virginia Vidaura said, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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e8d84ad
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Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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862c485
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Is it a wolf I hear, Howling his lonely communion With the unpiloted stars, Or merely the self importance and servitude In the bark of a dog? How many millenia did it take, Twisting and torturing The pride from the one To make a tool, The other? And how do we measure the distance from spirit to spirit? And who do we find to blame?
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Richard K. Morgan |
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ebd20a3
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DISAPPOINTMENT IS A SLOW POISON.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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c32d54f
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Potential, and the will to deploy it. That's all magic is in the end, you know.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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67abfd9
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The city you speak of will be built--will stand in all its undeserved serenity--on the bones of a billion unjust, unremembered deaths. Its foundation stones are mortared with the blood of ten thousand suffering generations that no one there recalls or cares about. Its citizens live out their safe, butterfly lives in covered gardens and brilliant halls without the slightest idea or interest in how they came to have it all. She comes abruptly..
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Richard K. Morgan |
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2bd1bbb
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Religion is religion, however you wrap it, and like Quell says, a preoccupation with the next world pretty clearly signals an inability to cope credibly with this one.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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4478338
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You should have heard the boatman who brought me up here from the Glades. Fire in the northern sky, lights in the marshes, a black dog heard barking through the night. Doesn't occur to anyone to wonder how exactly you can tell it's a black dog just from the fucking bark it makes.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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0f940a7
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It was the blue-tinged taste of a regret so deep you could never plumb its depths. It was the victory at Rajal that never came, it was his brother walking away down the long dark wood corridor, it was a life he might have had in Yhelteth if disgust and fury had not sent him away in disgrace instead. It was the slaves he could not free, the screaming women and children of Ennishmin he could not save, the piled-up, silent dead and the smashed..
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regret
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Richard K Morgan |
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d95274e
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This enemy you cannot kill," I murmured. He nodded and finished the quote for me. "You can only drive it back damaged into the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return."
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Richard K. Morgan |
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fcb3441
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The priest I didn't talk to at all, because I didn't want to have to hide his body afterward.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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efcc6fc
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She blinked and kissed me abruptly, somewhere between mouth and cheek. It was an inaccuracy I didn't try to correct either way. I turned away before I could see if there were going to be any tears and started for the doors at the far end of the hall. I looked back once, as I was mounting the steps. Ortega was still standing there, arms wrapped around herself, watching me leave. In the stormlight, it was too far away to see her face clearly...
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parting
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Richard K. Morgan |
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86ed1e9
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Running away just makes your arse a bigger target.
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target
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Richard K. Morgan |
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1b01d6f
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Everyone's afraid of what they don't understand," Ringil said quietly."
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understanding
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Richard K. Morgan |
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90f188e
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What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or, slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing. Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change. The only way to beat that was to go on stack forever. Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we ar..
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Richard K. Morgan |
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f05dc88
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People are sheep, Ringil raged. Moronic fucking sheep.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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824f506
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In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always ask what it is, and who will be paying. If you don't, then the agenda makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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6c3ad51
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Rage at injustice is a forest fire -- it jumps all divides, even those between generations.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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63eead2
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We Ringil grinned fiercely up at the Kiriath clan captain.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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49b46c1
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Wealth, in his experience, was not something the people who had it were at all keen to see trickling anywhere.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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116582f
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From a legal point of view--" He shook his head. "Forget the law. It isn't going to help. They'll cite it where it suits them, ignore it where it doesn't. They're clerics, Archeth. They spend their whole fucking lives selectively interpreting textual authority to advantage."
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Richard K. Morgan |
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050c983
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Humans, short-lived and locked out of the gray places for life, do not do well with uncertainty. If they cannot have what might, what could, what should, and perhaps most awful of all what should have been, then they will dream it up instead, imagine it into being in whatever twisted or beautiful form suits, and then drive their fellows to their knees in chains by the thousand and million to pretend in chorus that it is so.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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796d26b
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Men were like blades, they would all break sooner or later, you included. But you looked around at the men you led, and in their eyes you saw what kind of steel you had to hand, how it had been forged and tempered, what blows, if any, it would take.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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d375a9c
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You know nothing of me." Through clenched teeth. " . You've fucked me, that's all. Well, that's a crowded hole you're in, darling. And us humans, we're a lying, dissembling bunch, remember. Doesn't pay to trust us between the sheets any more than anywhere else."
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Richard K. Morgan |
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42e46ac
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Well." Ringil gave the Throne Eternal captain another brittle little smile. "You know, the thing about fucking is, it's a lot less wear and tear than trying to kill each other with bits of steel. And it's the sort of thing that does tend to lead to confidences and favours if you play it right. Ask any woman, she'll tell you that. Unless of course your experiences in that direction are limited, as, come to think of it, yours probably are, to..
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Richard K. Morgan |
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08b2f82
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Face the facts. Then act on them. It's the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it's harder than you'd think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don't pray, don't wish, don't buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don't give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of . . . whatever. Face the facts. Then act.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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d6ecc12
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It was like resolution. The circling antagonisms collapsed inward like orbitals crashing and burning, surrendering to a mutual gravity that had dragged like chains while it endured but in release was a streak of fire through the nerves.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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00d987c
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It has been a messy week, and I blame myself as much as anyone else. I feel like a behaviourist who has designed her rat's maze poorly.
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psychology
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Richard K. Morgan |
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2df2fd9
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Religion is funny stuff, and it has unpredictable effects on those who use it.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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36d683a
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Every previous revolutionary movement in human history has made the same basic mistake. They've all seen power as a static apparatus, as a structure. And it's not. It's a dynamic, a flow system with two possible tendencies. Power either accumulates, or it diffuses through the system. In most societies, it's in accumulative mode, and most revolutionary movements are only really interested in reconstituting the accumulation in a new location...
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Richard K. Morgan |
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4a5db77
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Take up citizenship and the conversion it entailed, send a couple of your sons to the levy when they were of age, pay taxes calculated not to drive you and your family into penury or the mountains and the life of a bandit. Oh, and while you're at it, steer clear of debt and disease. Chances were -- -- if you did all that, you'd never starve, never have your home burned down and your children raped before your eyes, never have to wear a sl..
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conversion
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Richard K. Morgan |
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e95cb20
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Well than try giving it some thought, why don't you? Apply that finely tutored mind of yours to all those bullshit hero-with-a-high-destiny legends you people are so fucking fond of telling one another. You really think, in a mudball slaughterhouse of a world like this, where war and privation harden whole populations to inhuman brutality and ignorance, where the ruling classes dedicate their sons to learning the science of killing men the ..
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Richard K. Morgan |
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636a9c9
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I'll tell you what I see, and at no charge. You know much of war, you carry its spirit stabbed deep inside you, just as he up there has the steel within him. Just as deeply buried, just as hard and unyielding to all the softer things you are and want and own to. And just as bitter in its wounding. You think you'll be free of it one day; you carry it as if the wound will someday heal. But for you, just as for him, there will be no healing." ..
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Richard K. Morgan |
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ddaba34
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Freed hands both rising for the pommel now, so natural, so smooth, it was like Kiriath machinery, as if he machinery, a cunningly crafted clockwork Kiriath mannequin, built to complement the steel. He felt the accustomed kiss of the grip on his palms, felt the grin on his face turn into a snarl. Cold chime as the scabbard gave up its embrace. And the Ravensfriend came out.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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2f080e9
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His lack of condemnatory zeal gave him a reputation in the religious hierarchy that ensured he would always remain a humble teacher in a backwater town.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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89a57e5
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In order to bring about a convulsive political change, it was essential to intensify the existing social tensions to the point where all would be driven to choose sides in what would thus be established as a simplistic equation of class conflict. Marxists and their ideological inheritors described this as sharpening the contradictions of society.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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8e3528d
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I'm Kristin Ortega, Organic Damage Division. Bancroft was my case.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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2c006b6
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And now he couldn't cloak it any longer, the leaking sense of loss, more fucking loss, soaking through into the same old general, swirling sense of betrayal, years upon pissed-away years of it, made bitter and particular on his tongue now, as if Grace-of-Heaven had come wormwood into his mouth in those final clenched, pulsing seconds.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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30ce151
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No hagas juicios en tres dimensiones de lo que solo puedes ver en la pantalla de un televisor.
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Richard K. Morgan |
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97e9ddc
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Can't fucking believe it's come to this," it muttered. "Negotiating with a fucking herdsman -- you know, sometimes it's -- listen, I was the thief of once, you goat-shagging thug. You know that? The fucking doom bringer to kings." An arm thrown out in exasperation. "Back when the earth was young, back when there was still a in the fucking sky, I pulled on whatever flesh was needful and I struck terror into the hearts of the powerful and..
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Richard K. Morgan |
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99cede2
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But I won't watch them go to war again. I've been to war, you know, to save civilization from the reptile hordes. I bled for it, I saw friends and other men die for it. And then I watched men like you piss it away again, the civilization we'd saved, in squabbles over a few hundred square miles of territory and what language the people get to speak there, what color their skin and hair is and what kind of religious horseshit they get crammed..
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war
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Richard K. Morgan |
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0045992
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These are pious, clean-living men, worshipping at the temple of their own bodies." "Hmm. Sounds distinctly erotic."
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Richard K. Morgan |