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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6d0ecc5 | The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine. Reality doesn't offer this assurance, so it's very easy to develop the mistaken impression that you're in control. | Richard K.Morgan | ||
| 6ba6f12 | That's right, Dragonbane. And brothers always stood together, the buffalo came when they were called, the grass grew taller and greener, and it never fucking rained. Get a grip, old man. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 52b6e96 | Ringil, preparing to hand out some straightforward reassurance, felt mischief sparkle through him instead. It was the call of impending risk, he knew, the itch to action--and a long building irritation with Nyanar that finally flared to life. He put on a breezy grin. "But my lord Nyanar! That's what gives life its savor, is it not? Where would we be if the future were always known?" | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| a0b3b60 | Strange how you could become a man's god without noticing. | power introspection | Richard K. Morgan | |
| 99516df | You thought perhaps you would drink it away, the plague? Was that the plan?" "I thought perhaps I'd try to die drunk." "Such ambition. And this from a dragon-slayer." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| b880764 | Edna vecher, kogato se biakhme napili, Sara mi kaza: ,,Zhenite sa rasata, Tak. Takava e istinata. M'zhete sa samo mutanti s poveche muskuli i dvoino po-malko nervi. Mashini za boi i chukane". Sobstvenite mi prezhiviavaniia v tela ot drugiia pol podkrepiakha tazi teoriia. Da b'desh zhena be prezhiviavane, nesravnimo s m'zhkoto bitie. Useshchaneto za dopir stavashe mnogo po-pl'tno, osiguriavashe s's sredata vzaimodeistvie, koeto m'zhkata pl't.. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 68acf7b | At about the same time I was working out there were no wounds in my chest someone wiped a towel roughly across my face and I could see. I decided to save that pleasure for later and concentrated on getting the contents of the tank out of my nose and throat. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| ca6e499 | Voltar dos mortos pode ser dureza. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| caf15d6 | And though, finally, they would bring him down with sheer weight of numbers, none who heard him ask that question lived to see the dawn. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 7d1116c | Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?" She made a tiny spitting sound. "You can always get some more people. They reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant," | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| ac4ba4e | You can't talk to people like that. Soldiers, corporate execs, politicians. All you can do is kill them, and even that rarely makes things any better. They just leave their shit behind, and someone else to carry on. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 447b8d3 | Too much virtuality will do that to you sometimes. There's this vague feeling of abrasion in the head when you disconnect, a disquieting sense that reality isn't quite sharp enough anymore, a waxing and waning fuzziness that might be what the edge of madness feels like. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 0c199e5 | Already on course for the door, I made no attempt to detour in their direction, and this must have occurred to them only when I was halfway across the hall. Two of them drifted over to intercept me with the easy calm of big cats that have been fed recently. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 022dc12 | I hesitated, pretending to weigh it up. "What's the deal in the bar?" "Ha ha ha." Someone had programmed a laugh into the robot. It sounded like a fat man drowning in syrup." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 957a55c | Dig down into the blood depths of hormonal bedrock, where violence and sex and power grow fibrously entwined. It's a murky, complicated place down there. No telling what you'll drag up once you start excavating. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 3bee5a9 | Incessant junk rhythm music thrashed the air as if this was the ventricle of some massive heart on tetrameth. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 695c4af | Nyman's lips tightened to almost anal proportions. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| efd245f | outside. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| e7aa7a9 | Something was pushing me, something that had very little to do with the look the Mongol had given me. Something dark that had spread its wings on the low-key misery of the cabin, something uncontrolled that Virginia Vidaura would have bawled me out for. I could hear Jimmy de Soto whispering in my ear. "You waiting for me?" I asked the Mongol's back, and saw how the muscles in it tensed. Maybe one of the dealers felt it coming. He held up hi.. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| df1487f | An-Kirilnar is." The Helmsman stopped dead, so abruptly that it took her a moment to realize there were no more words coming. Flicker of shifting light across the optics, there and gone. But this time she saw it for certain. "Angfal?" "Quests are pretexts, Archeth. They are tales told, narrative blankets to wrap you against the cold you cannot bear." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 7127c8f | Something's not right. Without applying rationale as a mediator, select your first impulse. What would it be? | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 177e121 | People envy me, people hate me. It is the price of success." This was news to me. People hate me on a dozen different worlds, and I've never considered myself a successful man." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 0edafb7 | I remembered the way Reileen Kawahara had dealt with two unfaithful minions. The animal sounds they had made came back to me in dreams for a long time afterwards. Reileen's argument, framed as she peeled an apple against the backdrop of those screams, was that since no one really dies anymore, punishment can come only through suffering. I felt my new face twitch, even now, with the memory. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| b380617 | Warden Sullivan, you're not taking this in the spirit it's intended. I am very concerned to know who you sold me to. I'm not going to go away, just because you have some residual scruples about client confidentiality. Believe me, they didn't pay you enough to hold out on me. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| c280d19 | The essence of control is to remain hidden from view, is it not? | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 3c72c3b | Against the distant roar of the maelstrom I heard it. The hurrying strop of rotor blades on the fabric of the night. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| ad553cc | simulacrum | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 39fdea3 | Given enough traces of continuity, you could make a leap that enabled you to see the whole as a kind of premonition of real knowledge. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 35f3268 | A weapon--any weapon--is a tool, she told us. Cradled in her arms was a Sunjet particle gun. Designed for a specific purpose, just as any tool is, and only useful in that purpose. You would think a man a fool to carry a force hammer with him everywhere simply because he is an engineer. And as it is with engineers, so it is doubly with Envoys. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 06b2195 | Space, to use a cliche, is big. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 5c93213 | They are what we once dreamed of as gods, mythical agents of destiny, as inescapable as Death, that poor old peasant laborer, bent over his scythe, no longer is. Poor Death, no match for the mighty altered-carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval arrayed against him. Once we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously with his somber dignity, and beings like these won't even let him in the tradesman's entrance. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 32ea855 | Kultur, kirli hava gibidir. Farkinda olmasaniz dahi etkilenirsiniz. | kültür | Richard K. Morgan | |
| a8fe86a | Perspective.' He nodded and swung an arm out over his property. 'You see that tree. Just beyond the tennis courts.' I could hardly miss it. A gnarled old monster taller than the house, casting shade over an area the size of a tennis court in itself. I nodded. 'That tree is over seven hundred years old. When I bought this property, I hired a design engineer and he wanted to chop it down. He was planning to build the house further up the rise.. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| b1907ff | Wardani had donned the emotional equivalent of a vacuum suit, the only response left in the human armoury when the moral parameters of the outside environment have grown so outrageously variable that an exposed mind can no longer survive unshielded. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 6eee2d7 | Part of running a successful tyranny is knowing when and how to let your subjects off the leash, and at this the First Families were accomplished masters. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| dc7bd73 | Childishness is a common enough sin amongst humans. Perhaps we should not be so quick to judge. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 1be49b1 | who knows how the data behind these metaphors has traveled, from where and for how long. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| e795c1e | So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 8a398e1 | The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here--it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| c036c7e | The human race has dreamed of heaven and hell for millennia. Pleasure or pain unending, undiminished, and uncurtailed by the strictures of life or death. Thanks to virtual formatting, these fantasies can now exist. All that is needed is an industrial-capacity power generator. We have indeed made hell--and heaven--on earth. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 3ab57d6 | You know, the aspirants believe this is the only true existence. That everything outside is an illusion, a shadow play created by the ancestor gods to cradle us until we can build our own tailored reality and Upload into it. That's comforting, isn't it. | science singularity transhumanism theology | Richard K. Morgan | |
| a1a5543 | The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions: artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazard-proof bodywork, which most cyberengineering firms designed to spec for the task at hand. The last robot I'd seen on the World was a gardening crab. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 64e6d26 | A robe-straining belly offered itself. I stepped in and the Tebbit knife leapt upward, unzipping. I went eye to eye with the man I was gutting. A lined, bearded visage glared back. I could smell his breath. Our faces were centimetres apart for what seemed like minutes before the realisation of what I had done detonated behind his eyes. I jerked a nod, felt the twitch of a smile in one clamped corner of my mouth. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 6e167e9 | Any synthetic intelligence can be independent only within the boundaries of the U.N. regulatory charter. The charter is hardwired into my systems, so in effect I have as much to fear from the police as a human does. | Richard K. Morgan |