1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
7778
7779
7780
7781
7782
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| b7e08a7 | The priest I didn't talk to at all, because I didn't want to have to hide his body afterwards. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| b27e5ca | He is as corrupt as the rest of them. As all the materialists.' 'Yeah, but give him his due. If his daughter ever gets raped, he's unlikely to beat her to death for dishonouring him.' She flinched. 'You are talking about an isolated incident, this is not--' 'Four.' I held out my fingers, rigid in front of her face. 'I'm talking about four isolated incidents. And that's just this year. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 34ea3af | Basically, she argues that the Secession was an example of a nation-state going extinct because it failed to adapt. America couldn't cope with modernity, it died from the shock and was torn apart by more adaptive entities. Though I think she tends to skate around the edge of what America really died of." "Which is what?" Yavuz shrugged. "Fear." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 2dedf1c | See, once upon a time," Yavuz was saying, "fear was a unifying force. Back then, you could make a country strong with xenophobia. That's the old model, the nation-state fortress thing. But you can't live in a fortress when your whole way of life depends on globalized interdependence and trade. Once that happens, xenophobic tendency becomes a handicap, in Groombridge's terms a non-adaptive trait." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| f95f88f | Lies are a precious currency--you have to be careful how and where you spend them. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 383817d | They'd spit in your eye and walk away if you called them victims, but somehow that same grit never found its way into any built form better than hardscrabble endurance and nonspecific rage. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 0d4044f | They tell you to save the ship at all costs. No one ever talks about whether the passengers and crew deserve all that effort. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| da5a13a | You know what you stupid fucking conspiracy assholes just don't get? No one is that well organized. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 1caab3f | She sounded like sex for its own heated sake, like death in a good cause, like clarity of purpose without the dragging, piled-up weight of a million dirty little compromises along the way... | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| d029315 | There isn't actually any escape. Once you understand this, you are empowered. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 8690ca7 | Got a brother served up at the Dhashara pass, he always did say you lot let your women run riot. Mouthing off like they were men, riding horses, carrying weapons, shit like that." "Been known to happen," Egar agreed. "Yeah, well, that shit won't wash down here. This is Yhelteth, this is the Empire. We're civilized. Women know their place. And truth is, I'm about fucking sick of the trouble we get from your kind coming in here." Grudging, bi.. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| aacc02c | To recommend change, as this report does, is not to suggest that the problems we address will disappear or no longer require attention. At most they will disappear from view, and this may very well be a counterproductive outcome, since it cannot fail to encourage a complacency we can ill-afford. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 473fbe9 | These days, one of them told me one freezing slow-as-Sunday night, we're all just feeding off the stored fat of a dream gone bad. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| b4cbeb0 | The police are more impressive by night. First of all, you've got the flashing lights casting dramatic color into everyone's faces, grim expressions steeped alternately in criminal red and smoky blue. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| cefd991 | It's always far easier to murder and tear down than it is to build and educate. Easier to let power accumulate than diffuse. | philosophy-of-life political | Richard K. Morgan | |
| 9d14159 | It's not parole." The corps' deep-cover training came rocketing in across my mind like a flight of low-level strike jets, spinning vapor-trail lies on the edge of plausibility and half-known detail. Something inside me tilted with the joy of mission time. "You know what I went down for?" | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 2212b30 | His companions stared at me like frightened children as I came down the stairs, like I'd come down to them on Pachamama's Own Ladder to the Firmament--some dark spirit too tarnished and twisted with sin to make it through, barred at the top by divine Inti's doormen, found corrupt and wanting, and thrown back down from paradise among the stars. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 46f5e71 | But this was worse than personal. This was about Louise, alias Anemone, cut up on a surgical platter, about Elizabeth Elliott stabbed to death and too poor to be resleeved, Irene Elliott, weeping for a body that a corporate rep wore on alternate months, Victor Elliott, whiplashed between loss and retrieval of someone who was and yet was not the same woman. This was about a young black man facing his family in a broken-down, middle-aged whit.. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 8a54cae | Fact remains--launch determines orbit, and Torres got a launch in life that put him low and in decay from the start. You just give it time and watch the sky. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| b5c25b8 | It'll take a stronger kind of human to deal with it, but that's always been the case, with every major step in knowledge or technology that we take. You can't get by on past models, you have to keep moving forward, building better minds and bodies. Either that or the universe moves in like a swamp panther and eats you alive. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| cc239c5 | The man in front of me was different. His frame was that of a Caucasian Nordic, topping mine by nearly thirty centimeters, but the face was at odds. It began African, broad and deep ebony, but the color ended like a mask under the eyes, and the lower half was divided along the line of the nose, pale copper on the left, corpse white on the right. The nose was both fleshy and aquiline and mediated well between the top and bottom halves of the.. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| b940a44 | Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done. Virginia Vidaura, pacing the seminar room, lost in lecture mode. But the fact that a sextant will let you navigate accurately across an ocean does not mean that the sun and stars do rotate.. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 6d53700 | Half the things we dig up, we have no idea what they are, and we still sell them as fucking coffee-table trinkets. Right now, someone back on Latimer has probably got the encoded secret of a faster-than-light drive mounted on their fucking living room wall." She paused. "And it's probably upside down." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 3dae9bf | But then that's humans for you--never can trust the stroppy fuckers to live up to the stereotypes you assign. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 67d5907 | Real monsters will always disappoint. The unseen threat, the rumour, is a far greater power. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| ee1f610 | Anyway, it's a crock of shit. Simple-minded post-quranic desert Islam propaganda. No one in the modern Muslim world with two brain cells to rub together believes that shit any more. And who wants a fucking virgin anyway? You got to teach them every fucking thing. Like having sex with a fucking shop mannequin with its motion circuits shot up. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 4b98497 | It is not our enemies that defeat us. It is our fear. Do not be afraid of the monsters, Miss Elizabeth. Make them afraid of you. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| b7b3d0a | Like all lotteries, it was an attempt to distract and dilute labor force discontent with irrational hope. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 4932614 | They killed us twenty thousand years ago with their crops and their craven connivance at hierarchy. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 26c8a6f | Served up through the id-feeding Technicolor TV drip that passed for national news coverage, he was just new dosage in a regime already 150 years screen-ingrained. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 421e2a1 | Residual biosystems glitches, they said, and told me it'd fade with time. I believed them, because in the end almost everything does. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 4aa69cf | Which part of get the fuck out didn't you understand, hard man?" I got the fuck out." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 6035836 | She said, I have no excuses, least of all for God. Like all tyrants, he is not worthy of the spit you would waste on negotiations. The deal we have is infinitely simpler--I don't call him to account, and he extends me the same courtesy. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| d2d4f5f | Tell me something, Gradual--back in Hellas, do they categorize the triads as organized crime?" I paused to let the insult sink in. "Because over here in the Gash, if someone inside the familias andinas was this fucking disorganized, they'd last about ten minutes." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 3c23fc0 | They exploit, and deal, and shift ground constantly, but for all that, you can get used to them. You can get used to their gleaming company towers and their nanocopter security, their cartels and their HOGs, their stretched-over-centuries unhuman patience and their assumed inheritance of godfather status for the human race. You can get so you're grateful for the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God relief of whatever little flange of existence th.. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 186bba8 | Look at that, Kovacs. We're drinking coffee so far from Earth you have to work hard to pick out Sol in the night sky. We were carried here on a wind that blows in a dimension we cannot see or touch. Stored as dreams in the mind of a machine that thinks in a fashion so far in advance of our own brains, it might as well carry the name of God. We have been resurrected into bodies not our own, grown in a secret garden without the body of any mo.. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 9a9a31b | we're all just feeding off the stored fat of a dream gone bad. You want soy sauce on that? | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 281a39a | I nodded. "Good luck." "What?" "I thought one of us should say it. Didn't look like it was going to be you." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| 7fd65bc | I felt a cold circle of metal touch the base of my skull. "That's exactly what you think it is," a calm voice said. "Yo do the wrong thing, and the cops are going to be picking bits of your cortical stack out of that wall for weeks." | duress | Richard K. Morgan | |
| c27e0b0 | The strain on her face was still there, like weathered rocks under a thin mantle of snow. | simile | Richard K. Morgan | |
| 937cb22 | I don't think I really believe in paradise, Carl. You want to know the truth, I don't think any of us do really. Deep down, down where it counts, I think we all know it's a crock of shit. That's why we're all so fucking determined to spread the good news, to shove it down other people's throats. Because if we can't make other people believe it, how are we going to stamp out the doubt in ourselves. And it's cold, that doubt. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| a6f6c24 | She and Torres have history all over the place. Stuck together in the data like tissues on a lap dance cabin floor. | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| c9242ec | Now." The monosyllable had all the give of a depleted uranium slug. "You had better come and see us now." | Richard K. Morgan | ||
| eed604c | There was finely toned muscle in her legs, and a substantial biceps stood out when she lifted her arms. Exuberant breasts strained the fabric of the leotard. I wondered if the body was hers. | Richard K. Morgan |