Ian McDonald

Quotes

1. He had sworn on his father's honour, his mother's life, his brother's masculinity, his sister's purity and his prophet's beard that he would never set foot there again. God, knowing people, thinks little of honour or purity or even life, but vows made on his prophet he loves to confound.

   p. 178

2. 

   The five minutes ticked away on Limaal Mandella’s fob watch and the tension wound tight around Corporation Plaza. Rael Mandella Jr., sweating in his father’s best championship suit, was horrified to realize how few of such brief five-minute periods went to make up a lifetime.

   p. 238

3. 

   Half your DNA's owned by some biotech corporation. Every time you have sex, you break copyright.

   p. 58

4. 

   These songs were the true names of things, spoken by the soul, so easily buried under the little busynesses of everyman everyday.

   p. 111

5. 

   I've always found that the root of a computer problem is human frailty

   p. 27

6. 

   She had not won a clean victory. Tinkering with time and history offended her political sensibilities. History was written in the stones. It was not a numinous thing to be tossed sparkling in the air to lie where it fell. She did not like to think of her life and world as a mere mutability of potentials.

   p. 327

7. 

   A chilly piety leaked into the air.

   p. 248

8. 

   "The words still don't move."

   "The words don't need to move. It is you who is moved by them."

   p. 239

9. 

   Once muddying subjectivities are removed from the issue, the decision becomes clear.

   p. 247

10. 

    Ghosts? Pah. We are the most substantial things in the world, the foundations of the present. We are memories.

    p. 270

11. 

    “Hey!” the people cried in their dreams. “Give us back our ghosts!” for ghosts are as much a part of a community as its plumbing or its library, for how can a community be without its memories?

    p. 94

12. 

    Any aeai [A.I., artificial intelligence ] smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.

    p. 42