Look To Windward

Quotes

1. “You serious?”

   “I’m always serious, never more so than when I’m being flippant.”

   p. 231

2. 

   Believe me; democracy in action can be an unpretty sight.

   p. 198

3. 

   “Elated? Pleased?”

   “Those are the closest words. There is an undeniable elation in causing mayhem, in bringing about such massive destruction. As for feeling pleased, I felt pleasure that some of those who died did so because they were stupid enough to believe in gods or afterlives that do not exist, even though I felt a terrible sorrow for them as they died in their ignorance and thanks to their folly.”

   p. 315

4. 

   Are you really as ignorant as you appear, Trelsen, or is this some sort of bizarre act, perhaps even meant to be amusing?

   p. 231

5. 

   “They spend time. That’s just it. They spend time traveling. The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They persist in hoping that something they think they’ll find in the place they’re heading for will somehow provide them with a fulfilment they feel certain they deserve and yet have never come close to experiencing.”

   Ziller frowned and tapped at his pipe bowl. “Some travel forever in hope and are serially disappointed. Others, slightly less self-deceiving, come to accept that the process of travelling itself offers, if not fulfilment, then relief from the feeling that they should be feeling fulfilled.”

   p. 113

6. 

   Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and wilfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.

   p. 25

7. 

   Oh, yeah, this Ziller guy. Some spoiled, fur-rending liberal brat who thinks it’s his God-given duty to do the whining for those who can’t be bothered whining for themselves.

   p. 73

8. 

   I’m supposed to be at this sort of thing but even I find it pretty damn tedious at times. Still, receptions and parties are pan-cultural, so we’re told. I’ve never been sure whether to be reassured or appalled by that.

   p. 154

9. 

   There is an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.

   p. 324

10. 

    “Oh. I didn’t realise.”

    “Then you’re simply ignorant rather than malevolent. Congratulations.”

    p. 231

11. 

    “The point is,” Ziller said, “that having carefully constructed their paradise from first principles to remove all credible motives for conflict amongst themselves and all natural threats...Well, almost all natural threats, these people then find their lives are so hollow they have to recreate false versions of just the sort of terrors untold generations of their ancestors spend their existences attempting to conquer.”

    p. 114

12. 

    Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do.

    p. 317

13. 

    Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts?

    p. 316

14. 

    “What, now?”

    “Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.”

    p. 176

15. 

    The background to the war, my studious Homomdan pal, is three thousand years of ruthless oppression, cultural imperialism, economic exploitation, systematic torture, sexual tyranny and the cult of greed ingrained almost to the point of genetic inheritability.

    p. 66

16. 

    We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they point the way to future triumphs. 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.

    p. 36

17. 

    Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side.

    We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too.

    p. 316

18. 

    When it was first revealed that each of our own deaths had to be balanced by that of an enemy—

    ~ It wasn’t revealed, Huyler. It was made up. It was a tale we told ourselves, not something the gods graced us with.

    p. 335

19. 

    “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 civilisationally.”

    p. 312

20. 

    ~ Want to know one ugly thought?

    ~ Are there not enough in the world already?

    ~ Assuredly. But sometimes ugly thoughts can be prevented from becoming ugly deeds by exposing them.

    ~ If you say so.

    ~ One should always ask who has most to gain.

    p. 382

21. 

    “But even if all the other stuff seems a bit esoteric, just think of all those other avatars at all those other gatherings, concerts, dances, ceremonies, parties and meals; think of all that talk, all those ideas, all that sparkle and wit!”

    “Think of all that bullshit, the nonsense and non-sequiturs, the self-aggrandisement and self-deception, the boring stupid nonsense, the pathetic attempts to impress or ingratiate, the slow-wittedness, the incomprehension and the incomprehensible, the gland-addled meanderings and general suffocating dullness.”

    p. 245

22. 

    “The point is: what happens in heaven?”

    “Unknowable wonderfulness?”

    “Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn’t represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.”

    “Have you always thought that?”

    If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual’s circumstances—and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse—then you don’t have life after death; you just have death.”

    “There are those who believe that after death the soul is recreated into another being.”

    “That is conservative and a little stupid, certainly, but not actually idiotic.”

    “And there are those who believe that, upon death, the soul is allowed to create its own universe.”

    “Monomaniacal and laughable as well as provably wrong.”

    “There there are those who believe that the soul—”

    “Well, there are all sorts of different beliefs. However, the ones that interest me are those concerning the idea of heaven. That’s the idiocy it annoys me that others cannot see.”

    p. 229

23. 

    Is your own existence so replete with equanimity you find no outlet for worry except on behalf of others?

    p. 67

That’s all the quotes.

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