The Wine of Violence

Quotes

1. “Zolmec,” said Nazra, “has always taught that the greatest words are ‘I could very well be wrong.’”

   p. 185

2. 

   It was not a question of regressive old ideas versus enlightened new ideas, but of reasonable caution versus arrogant caprice.

   p. 46

3. 

   Children, being close to the ground, have a special rapport with insects.

   p. 17

4. 

   “Everyone here does think as I do,” replied Nefertiti Jones’s double, “and consequently I have no enemies.”

   p. 119

5. 

   The new homeland bulged with the sort of free-for-the-grabbing bounty that invites greed, envy, exploitation, profiteering, and politics.

   p. 12

6. 

   Often Burne found himself saying, “I don’t think you would make a very good soldier,” and with grating predictability he heard that he wouldn’t make a very good pacifist.

   p. 188

7. 

   The world’s odd tolerance of fighting cropped up again and again in Francis’s study of history, particularly ancient history. On Earth, where his remotest forebears lived, a person could be indisputably responsible for the deaths of thousands and still go down in the history books as some sort of great hero. This was before Francis understood the biological inevitability of violence, so he was bewildered. Why, he wanted to know, were the names of Samson, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Ulysses S. Grant, and Julius Caesar not obscenities, spoken after dark in whispers of revulsion and shame? The same teachers who couldn’t bring themselves to say shitbrain or ortwaddle openly discussed Alexander the Great.

   He never found anyone who had the answer. Until he got to Planet Carlotta, he never even found anyone who had the question.

   p. 19

8. 

   “Talo, it would appear that our sons are growing up.”

   She tut-tutted in mock solemnity. “And we always said, ‘It can’t happen here.’”

   p. 296

9. 

   Francis realized he was afflicted with what his father used to term “an erection of the curiosity organ.”

   p. 132

10. 

    Let’s just hope that gravity isn’t as heavy as it used to be...

    p. 8

11. 

    Naturally you expect the moral thing from me. But I’ve learned something, friend. Morals don’t count for a hell of a lot in this galaxy. I rank them somewhere between straight teeth and the ability to carry a tune.

    p. 303

12. 

    She was by some standards slovenly, failing to see any virtue in made beds, since, as she put it, you are either asleep or somewhere else. On her birthdays she was sad. This tradition traced to earliest childhood, when she had consistently misinterpreted her birthday parties to mean that she was dying. Why else would the world be going to such exorbitant lengths to cheer her up?

    Science was her first love. Long after the preschool years, she aspired to know the why of everything. Why babies had a Babinski reflex, and why the reflex disappeared. Why people licked their upper lips when concentrating, and why there was humor. Tez wanted to understand light. She wanted to solve mud, decipher rocks, and unlock grass.

    p. 48

13. 

    Someday that man will be astonished to discover there’s a whole world marching along outside his buzzing head.

    p. 136

14. 

    “As a race of scientists and thinkers,” she concluded, “we cannot claim with absolute certainty that Teot Yon’s personality is now beyond Heaven’s gates or inside Satan’s stewpot or about to enter the embryo of a bull. Some of us subscribe to the Afterworld Hypothesis, some to less cheerful views. We all know that as an empirical event Teot Yon’s existence is over, and it is time for his molecules to become air and ash and after that—where will his drifting pieces go and what new things will they help to form? Let the transformation begin!”

    p. 234

15. 

    A second slash ended the monster’s misery. So, he thought, this is how my Earthling ancestors ran their affairs. This is how lands were won, empires expanded, insurrections resisted, prisoners taken, slaves kept, heretics converted, captives made loquacious. For the first time in his life, Minnix felt himself a part of history.

    History, he decided, was a terrible idea.

    p. 223

16. 

    It is far more arrogant to profess intuitive knowledge of the sacred than scientific knowledge of the tangible.

    p. 44

17. 

    “What do you want out of life, Francis Lostwax?”

    Francis smiled. “To never hurt anybody again.” His lack of hesitation surprised him. “To feel clean.”

    p. 314

18. 

    Tez always had warm feelings about paradoxes. It was the scientist in her.

    p. 132

19. 

    Like most visionaries, The Teller saw the distant future with optical-glass clarity, the intermediate future with beeswax clarity, and the immediate future with the clarity of dark glasses dipped in tar.

    p. 153

20. 

    In physical pursuits Luli was considerably less passionate. Her idea of a good time in bed was breakfast.

    p. 21

21. 

    Father says don’t kill your principles just because the government is paying for the funeral.

    p. 257

22. 

    “On your planet, how do you tell somebody that you love her?”

    “It’s very complicated. You say, ‘I love you,’ and then you stand back and see what happens.”

    p. 112

23. 

    Every religion says war is evil, but one way or another they end up playing along.

    p. 164

24. 

    Nature may not be benign, but she is reliable.

    p. 157

25. 

    Smugness kills all utopias.

    p. 12

26. 

    Burne was tough. Burne practiced archeology, the most inconvenient of the sciences.

    p. 9

27. 

    In Francis’s view there was ultimate gold in this commitment to impractical knowledge, to theories that had no responsibilities other than to be true. On good days the new ideas inched human intellect toward the grand understandings that were science’s pride and joy.

    p. 130

28. 

    Like all good friends, they hated seeing their relationship lose its emotional innocence, its chastity of good will, and now that the thing was lost, now that searing statements had changed hands and left scars, neither looked forward to the future.

    p. 160

29. 

    Sneer, frown, and be miserable, for tomorrow you live.

    p. 202

30. 

    Luli turned out to be uncompromising and brilliant. She could prosecute honey before a jury of bears and win.

    p. 21

31. 

    Francis’s office did not come with a videophone; at times he was surprised that his office came with a floor.

    p. 25

32. 

    “That was a very pretty speech,” said Loloc, “but if it contained an answer to even one of my questions then I did not hear it.”

    p. 178

33. 

    People found ever more ingenious ways to hate each other.

    p. 12

34. 

    Francis had always been ecumenical in his atheism. He was as prepared to disbelieve in this Tolca character as he was to disbelieve in Yahweh, Jesus, Buddha, Vishnu, or any of the other words for what his father used to call “forcing yourself to misperceive the obvious.”

    p. 83

35. 

    Forgive me if I’m confusing you with logic.

    p. 157

36. 

    “I’ve always regretted not having a brother. Maybe I shouldn’t.”

    “For me it’s always been like having pubic hair. You have it, but what the hell is it for?”

    p. 110

That’s all the quotes.

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