Excession

Quotes

1. Even the pain of what had felt on occasion like an irretrievably broken heart had consistently proved less lasting than she’d initially imagined and expected; the revelation that a boy’s taste was so grotesquely deficient he could prefer somebody else to her always reduced both the intensity and the duration of the anguish her heart demanded be endured to mark such a loss of regard.

   p. 180

2. 

   He was tall and very dark-skinned and he had fabulously blond hair and a voice that could raise bumps on your skin at a hundred meters, or, better still, millimeters.

   p. 151

3. 

   I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.

   p. 269

4. 

   Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.

   p. 365

5. 

   Maybe it wasn’t anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or metaphilosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just...accounting.

   p. 364

6. 

   She supposed she ought to feel impressed that Genar-Hofoen was sticking to his principles in the face of imminent death—and she did feel a little admiration—but mostly she just thought he was being stupid.

   p. 369

7. 

   The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them.

   p. 133

8. 

   Here, in the bare dark face of night

   A calm unhurried eye draws sight

   —We see in what we think we fear

   The cloudings of our thought made clear

   p. 104

9. 

   If you have any helpful suggestions I’d be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.

   p. 219

10. 

    Death, he remembered somebody saying once, was a kind of victory. To have lived a long good life, a life of prodigious pleasure and minimal misery, and then to die; that was to have won. To attempt to hang on forever risked ending up in some as-yet-unglimpsed horror future. What if you lived forever and all that had gone before, however terrible things had sometimes appeared to be in the past, however badly people had behaved to each other throughout history, was nothing compared to what was yet to come? Suppose in the great book of days that told the story of everything, all the gone, done past was merely a bright, happy introduction compared to the main body of the work, an unending tale of unbearable pain scraped in blood on a parchment of living skin?

    Better to die than risk that.

    Live well and then die, so that the you that is you now can never be again, and only tricks can re-create something that might think it is you, but is not.

    p. 259

11. 

    I am not being obtuse.

    You are being paranoid.

    p. 136

12. 

    Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!

    p. 212

13. 

    It was just like some ancient electricity-powered computer; it didn't matter how fast, error-free, and tireless it was, it didn't matter how great a labor-saving boon it was, it didn't matter what it could do or how many different ways it could amaze; if you pulled its plug out, or just hit the off button, all it became was a lump of matter; all its programs became just settings, dead instructions, and all its computations vanished as quickly as they'd moved.

    It was, also, like the dependency of the human-basic brain on the human-basic body; no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out...

    That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome.

    p. 122

14. 

    Tishlin’s dubious look indicated he wasn’t totally convinced this phrase contributed enormously to the information-carrying capacity of the language.

    p. 58

15. 

    How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails.

    p. 372

16. 

    The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.

    p. 66

17. 

    He wanted to be who he was, not the person he would become if he lost the one trait that distinguished him from everybody else, no matter how perverse that decision seemed to others.

    p. 129

18. 

    It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm gray box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better...and then discovering a little hole in one corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you...so that you stepped out of the tiny box’s confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snowfields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn’t even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story.

    p. 120

19. 

    She took a deep breath. Suddenly, she felt quite entirely sober. “Is this as important as I think it is?”

    “Almost certainly much more so.”

    “Oh,” she said, “fuck.”

    p. 98

20. 

    There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.

    p. 149

21. 

    That’s the trouble with people like them, I suppose; whenever you think you’re detecting the first signs of them starting to behave responsibly, it’s just them being even more devious and underhand than usual.

    p. 261

That’s all the quotes.

21 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more