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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b1b451f | Marriage isn't like football, like bocce. One isn't good at it, nobody has a special gift. You stumble along, and if there is enough love--" she smiled at him-- "you learn." | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| 87b0b53 | There are no happy endings, he knew, because nothing ends; and if there were any being dispensed, a great many worthier people would be in line for them long before Michael and Laura and himself. But the happiness of the unworthy and the happiness of the so-so is as fragile and self-centered and dear as the happiness of the righteous and the worthy; and the happiness of the living is no less short and desperate and forgotten than the joys o.. | dear fragile happy-endings jonathan-rebeck joys-of-the-dead laura-durand living michael-morgan nothing-ends righteous self-centered unworthy worthy | Peter S. Beagle | |
| d57d337 | I've never really undestood," the unicorn mused as the man picked himself up," what you dream of doing with me, once you've caught me." The man leaped again, and she slipped away from him like rain. "I don't think you know yourself," she said." | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| f05231d | The dead," he had said once, "need nothing from the living, and the living can give nothing to the dead." At twenty-two, it had sounded precocious; at thirty-four, it sounded mature, and this pleased Michael very much. He had liked being mature and reasonable. He disliked ritual and pomposity, routine and false emotion, rhetoric and sweeping gestures. Crowds made him nervous. Pageantry offended him. Essentially a romantic, he had put away t.. | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| 3c86ef2 | He says that there is no such thing as a cat--it is just a shape that all manner of imps, hobs, and devilkins like to put on, to gain easy entrance into the homes of men. | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| 79a4d92 | That's the true test of a town, or of a king. A lord who cheats an ugly old witch will cheat his own folk by and by. Stop him while you can, before you grow used to him. | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| e92fe8b | The sight of her makes me want to do battle with all evil and ugliness, | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| a5ca463 | But the important thing is for you to understand that it doesn't matter whether the clock strikes ten next, or fifteen o'clock. You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you can understand that -- then any time at all will be the right time for you. | lessons-in-life love-life peter-s-beagle the-last-unicorn unicorn wisdom | Peter S. Beagle | |
| 00f243c | Farrell had seen pure white drunkenness before, but not often enough to recognize it at sight. He knew the thing itself, however--the freight train rattling and lurching comically from hilarity to slobbering sorrow, picking up speed as it passed through wild, aimless anger straight on into wild sickness; and then, running smoothly and almost silently now, into a dark place of shaking and sweating and crying, and out again with no warning to.. | drunkenness | Peter S. Beagle | |
| 67ba6bc | I sometimes think that a little fear, a little hunger, might be good for us--sharpen our souls, | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| e1b10a0 | The king is always watching her out of his pale eyes, wondering what she is, and the king's son wounds himself with loving her and wonders who she is. And every day she searches the sea and the sky, the castle and the courtyard, the keep and the king's face, for something she cannot always remember. What is it, what is it that she is seeking in this strange place? She knew a moment ago, but she has forgotten. | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| 9b75c31 | There's more meaning than magic to this | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| 7647675 | Oh, more people than not have some magic, they just forget about it. Children use it all the time - what do you think jump rope rhymes are, or bouncing ball games, or cat's cradles? Where do you think that girl, Aiffe, draws her power? Because she refuses to forget, that's all it is. | Peter S. Beagle | ||
| c05bed6 | In political matters I have always been a down-the-middle-line person. When it comes to leaders, I care less about their party affiliation and more about their character and competence. I don't care how they would vote on school prayer or abortion or gay marriage or gun laws. I want to know that they know what the hell they're doing, and that they are made of that kind of unswerving steel that will not be rattled in moments that count, no m.. | Brandon Webb | ||
| 9bcd221 | And there would come up from the sea its voice; and the sea has no voice, but mysteriously touches the strings within the soul of a man, so that the soul speaks in its own way, each soul lifting its peculiar message. | Jack Williamson | ||
| 92c34d9 | Barbee had wondered about insanity, sometimes with a brooding dread - for his own father, whom he scarcely remembered, had died in the forbidding stone pile of the state asylum. He had vaguely supposed that a mental breakdown must be somehow strange and thrilling, with an exciting conflict of horrible depression and wild elation. But perhaps it was more often like this, just a baffled apathetic retreat from problems grown too difficult to s.. | Jack Williamson | ||
| 51d73c4 | Your danger is something other than death, and uglier. Because she will try to change you--to arouse something in you that should never be awakened. | Jack Williamson | ||
| 02e9c4c | supernatural, and my own rational philosophy is founded on proven science. But I still believe in hell." The dark man smiled. "For every man manufactures his own private hell and peoples it with demons of his own creation, to torment him for his own secret sins, imagined or real. It's my business to explore those personal hells and expose their demons for what they are. Usually they turn out to be much less terrifying than they seem." | Jack Williamson | ||
| c4d966c | You'll run out of expletives soon; I'd advise saving some for later. Not that keeping forces in reserve has ever been precisely you guys' strong point, has it? | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 976e9fb | Socialists, charity workers, carers, people who volunteer to help others; they're all - and he's quite convinced about this - they're all in reality mean-spirited bastards, either self-deceiving bastards or - for their own filthy left-wing reasons - deliberately trying to destroy the self-esteem of normal, healthily ambitious people like him. Because if only everybody looked after their own interests everything would be fine, see? Level pla.. | do-gooders | Iain M. Banks | |
| 2b970db | We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they point the way to future success. But the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and to assume for a moment that it does, ever did or ever might is to make the most calamitous and hubristic of mistakes. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| c6cd3ae | It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky. | ethological-epicentre new-york-city snow-dark-sky | Iain M. Banks | |
| 60aad7b | Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious." | Iain M. Banks | ||
| badca73 | His jaw was slack and his mouth open, and he wondered if perhaps he would drown eventually; drowned by the falling rain. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 2d41a44 | As you say, DeWar, our shame comes from the comparison. We know we might be generous and compassionate and good, and could behave so, yet something else in our nature makes us otherwise." She smiled a small, empty smile. "Yes, I feel something I recognise as love. Something I remember, something I may discuss and mill and theorise over." She shook her head. "But it is not something I know. I am like a blind woman taking about how a tree mus.. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| ca44076 | It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders." "Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilizationally." -- | Iain M. Banks | ||
| cd240f0 | Almost every developing species had a creation myth buried somewhere in its past, even if by the time they'd become space-faring it was no more than a quaint and dusty irrelevance (though, granted, some were downright embarrassing). Talking utter drivel about thunderclouds having sex with the sun, lonely old sadists inventing something to amuse themselves with, a big fish spawning the stars, planets, moons and your own ever-so-special Peopl.. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| b7bcced | They were enemies, they had both been very close to death and the other had done little or nothing to intervene, but actually to kill her would be very difficult. Or maybe he only wanted to pretend that he would find it very difficult; maybe it would be no bother at all, and the sort of bogus camaraderie of doing the same job, though on different sides, was just that: a fake. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 8f8bb13 | conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition? | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 3e4eedf | It was rude, insulting and frequently infuriating, but it made such a refreshing change from the awful politeness of most people. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| a8b4f19 | The swirling mist lay in the bottom of such great bowls like a broth of dreams. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 8180af8 | though. Our Azadian friends are always rather nonplussed by our lack of a flag or a symbol, and the Culture rep here--you'll meet him tonight if he remembers to turn up--thought it was a pity there was no Culture anthem for bands to play when our people come here, so he whistled them the first song that came into his head, and they've been playing that at receptions and ceremonies for the last eight years." "I thought I recognized one of th.. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 0e7469a | The Idirans themselves had evolved on their planet Idir as the top monster from a whole planetful of monsters. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 76cdd84 | like a berserk raptor thrown into a nest of hibernating kittens... | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 5065d79 | The ship told you a guilty system recognises no innocents. I'd say it does. It recognises the innocence of a young child, for example, and you saw how they treated that. In a sense it even recognises the "sanctity" of the body... but only to violate it. Once again, Gurgeh, it all boils down to ownership, possession; about taking and having." | tyranny | Iain M. Banks | |
| 3e33708 | individual is obsolete. That's why life is so comfortable for us all. We don't matter, so we're safe. No one person can have any real effect anymore. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| a392c7e | Escape is a commodity like anything else. | consumerism | Iain M. Banks | |
| a896828 | It was the Culture's fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again. The | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 4367733 | Patience can be a means of letting matters mature to a proper state for action, not just a way of letting time slip away. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| a61e565 | He became aware, very slowly, very gradually, that he held some impossibly complex model of the contest in his head, unknowably dense, multifariously planed. He looked at that model, twisted it. The game changed. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| 0f15eec | The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they'd wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages." The avatar hesitated. It put its head a little to one side and narrowed its eyes. "How far do I have to.. | rock-climbing | Iain M. Banks | |
| 7d29e19 | War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of .. | simulation-hypothesis solipsism | Iain M. Banks | |
| 8317dde | The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion. | Iain M. Banks | ||
| ec4258e | he saw that which cannot be seen; a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that end, and to remove and to add and to smash and to create so that one particular collection of cells can go on, can move onwards and decide, and keeping moving, and keeping deciding, knowing that - if nothing else - at least it lives. And it had two shadows, it was two things; it was the need and it was the .. | Iain M. Banks |