The Hydrogen Sonata

Quotes

1. Ah, dear. How fine the line is between acceptably defiant bravado and hopelessly delusional boasting.

   p. 361

2. 

   ~My full name is the Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath. Cool, eh?

   p. 502

3. 

   “Have you always been so suspicious, Banstegeyn?”

   He looked at her, unsmiling. “No, I stumbled into a position of great power quite by accident.”

   p. 443

4. 

   “I do believe my sarcasm-meter just twitched.”

   “A false positive, I fear. I was being entirely sincere.”

   p. 291

5. 

   The truth is the truth. You tell it even when it hurts or it loses value even when it doesn’t.

   p. 505

6. 

   Promises take many shapes, and the more…momentous they are, the more they might look like threats. All great promises are threats, I suppose, to the way things have been until that point, to some aspect of our lives, and we all suddenly become conservative, even though we want and need what the promise holds, and look forward to the promised change at the same time.

   p. 388

7. 

   “I have buffed and polished my medals for decades of steady, dedicated watchfulness,” the marshal continued, clasping her hands behind her head as she leaned back and relaxed, legs crossed, “counted and re-counted my medals for outstanding work in simulations and exercises, carefully rearranged my medals for heroic bravery under virtual fire, and even found room for my many, many medals for exemplary valour in the face of fellow officers coveting the same promotions as I.”

   p. 443

8. 

   One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.

   p. 462

9. 

   We all think we’re special, and in a way we are, but, at the same time, that feeling of being special is one of the things that’s common to us all, that unites us and makes us the same as each other. And when that feeling of…specialness is questioned, we feel threatened, naturally.

   p. 388

10. 

    The news channels are spasming, or frothing, or whatever it is they do.

    p. 394

11. 

    “The person concerned sounds – to be polite – eccentric.”

    “That would be polite to the point of over-generosity,” Tefwe said. “Awkward, tetchy and unreasonable might be closer to the truth.”

    p. 263

12. 

    “Well,” the voice said, seemingly oblivious, “one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the same patterns of behaviour repeated by succeeding generations and across different species. You see the same dreams, the same hopes, the same ambitions and aspirations, reiterated, and the same actions, the same courses and tactics and strategies, regurgitated, to the same predictable and often lamentable effects, and you start to think, So? Does it really matter? Why really are you bothering with all this? Are these not just further doomed, asinine ways of attempting to fill your vacuous, pointless existence, wedged slivered as it is between the boundless infinitudes of dark oblivion bookending its utter triviality?”

    “Uh-huh,” she said. “Is this a rhetorical question?”

    “It is a mistaken question. Meaning is everywhere. There is always meaning. Or at least all things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present. It’s just that there’s no final Meaning, with a capital M. Though the illusion that there might be is comforting for a certain class of mind.”

    p. 210

13. 

    “I take comfort in the loyalty and faith you display towards your crew, Captain.”

    “My crew are loyal to me, Colonel; I am only loyal to the regiment and Gzilt. Also, faith is belief without reason; we operate on reason and nothing but. I have zero faith in my crew, just absolute confidence.”

    p. 249

14. 

    “That seems obsessive.”

    “Meticulous care can seem so to those unwilling to recognise it for its true worth.”

    p. 295

15. 

    I have lived ten thousand years; I am used to it. Lovers dying, civilisations dying…one develops a certain god-like indifference to it all, intellectually.

    p. 317

16. 

    Trust me; it is rarely an encouraging sign when the more apparel is removed, the less attractive a prospective sexual partner becomes.

    p. 316

17. 

    Obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination.

    p. 308

18. 

    Ignorance can be interesting.

    ∞

    Also fatal.

    p. 303

19. 

    “Anyway, it was all terribly well organised. Done with military precision.” He barked a laugh. “Better than that, actually; didn’t miss and hit their own people.”

    p. 204

20. 

    Never underestimate the sheer selfishness and stupidity of people.

    p. 92

21. 

    She hadn’t forgotten all her military training; one point she certainly recalled being taught was that anything that looked like an outrageous coincidence was probably enemy action.

    p. 177

22. 

    The Real – with its vast volumes of nothing between the planets, stars, systems and galaxies – was basically mostly vacuum; an averaged near-nothing incapable of true complexity due to its inescapable impoverishment of structure and the sheer overwhelming majority of nothingness over substance.

    p. 149

23. 

    We really are taking this person’s existence as being a fact, not a myth?

    ∞

    We are. It turns out that the myth which has been so carefully fostered is that his existence is mythical.

    p. 200

24. 

    We are largely the sum of all we’ve done, and to dispose of that knowledge would be to stop being one’s self.

    p. 174

25. 

    “His opinion was: ‘as a challenge, without peer. As music, without merit.’”

    p. 33

26. 

    The reaction was…mixed. Some people…hated it…others…really hated it.

    p. 124

27. 

    “So,” she said, “living all this time has been to no purpose, basically.”

    “True, but that hardly distinguishes me from anybody else, does it?”

    “But shouldn’t it, or there’s no point?”

    “No. Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean toward the latter. However, just having done more of it than another person doesn’t really make much difference.”

    p. 210

28. 

    All of which might make things a little difficult operationally

    ∞

    Understood. Life is limitations.

    ∞

    And glibness, patently, on occasion, too. Your pardon, but I sense motions being gone through.

    ∞

    On occasion, a superfluity of assiduousness can be vulgar.

    p. 145

29. 

    “I shall take that as meaning I am not being too hopelessly foolish.”

    “You may still be, but then so may I.”

    “Yes, well, let’s not make a competition out of it.”

    p. 151

30. 

    Of course there were doubts about it, there always had been; when you found out about all the other holy books there had ever been throughout the histories of other peoples throughout the galaxy, you realised how common they were, and how fallible, how restricted they were by the usual tribal prejudices and traditions of the people who – it took real blind faith not to accept – had made them up.

    p. 111

31. 

    He, Tik…hated clashing, atonal music. He was basically…taking the piss, showing how…easy it was to write…how difficult to…listen to.

    p. 127

32. 

    “So why are we bothering?”

    “Just in case.”

    “Just in case what?”

    “Just in case it turns out to be something we should have bothered about. Always try to avoid setting up future opportunities for kicking yourself.”

    p. 207

33. 

    It rarely paid to frighten the masses, and it never paid to confuse them.

    p. 92

34. 

    Here’s some thing we don’t know but we can maybe find out, and it’s something that other people don’t want us to know. How much more seductive can you get?

    p. 202

35. 

    One should never mistake pattern…for meaning.

    p. 127

That’s all the quotes.

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