Quotes from Richard K. Morgan

The strain on her face was still there, like weathered rocks under a thin mantle of snow.

The essence of control is to remain hidden from view

We're stuck, all of us, flailing around more or less creatively, washed up more or less conveniently, depending on luck. But stuck nonetheless, epoxied into life and circumstance, and always with limited options. The only question is what we do with those options, how we move forward into the time we have remaining.

The storage tubes were racked on heavy chains like torpedoes on either side of us, jacked into a central monitor system at one end of the hold via thick black cables that twisted across the floor like pythons. The monitor unit itself squatted heavily ahead of us like an altar to some unpleasant spider god.

Anyway, it's a crock of shit. Simple-minded post-quranic desert Islam propaganda. No one in the modern Muslim world with two brain cells to rub together believes that shit any more. And who wants a fucking virgin anyway? You got to teach them every fucking thing. Like having sex with a fucking shop mannequin with its motion circuits shot up.

Warden Sullivan, you're not taking this in the spirit it's intended. I am very concerned to know who you sold me to. I'm not going to go away, just because you have some residual scruples about client confidentiality. Believe me, they didn't pay you enough to hold out on me.

You know, the aspirants believe this is the only true existence. That everything outside is an illusion, a shadow play created by the ancestor gods to cradle us until we can build our own tailored reality and Upload into it. That's comforting, isn't it.

She and Torres have history all over the place. Stuck together in the data like tissues on a lap dance cabin floor.

Strange how you could become a man's god without noticing.

Well, you know, there's a Skaranak saying for times like these: Running away just makes your arse a bigger target.

Siempre habrá imbéciles como esos, tragándose dogmas enteros para no tener que pensar por sí mismos.

We sit here, three silhouettes carved from electronic sleet in the difference storm, and you talk like a cheap period drama. Limited vision, lieutenant, limited vision. Where is the voice that said altered carbon would free us from the cells of our flesh? The vision that said we would be angels.

A robe-straining belly offered itself. I stepped in and the Tebbit knife leapt upward, unzipping. I went eye to eye with the man I was gutting. A lined, bearded visage glared back. I could smell his breath. Our faces were centimetres apart for what seemed like minutes before the realisation of what I had done detonated behind his eyes. I jerked a nod, felt the twitch of a smile in one clamped corner of my mouth.

You thought perhaps you would drink it away, the plague? Was that the plan? I thought perhaps I'd try to die drunk. Such ambition. And this from a dragon-slayer.

It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death. The

They'd spit in your eye and walk away if you called them victims, but somehow that same grit never found its way into any built form better than hardscrabble endurance and nonspecific rage.

Too much virtuality will do that to you sometimes. There's this vague feeling of abrasion in the head when you disconnect, a disquieting sense that reality isn't quite sharp enough anymore, a waxing and waning fuzziness that might be what the edge of madness feels like. The

Now." The monosyllable had all the give of a depleted uranium slug. "You had better come and see us now.

If not, they would drift forever, because the universe is mostly night and darkened ocean.

And he remembered then where he was, remembered how he'd come to be there, the years it had taken, and last of all he remembered he was old.

Any synthetic intelligence can be independent only within the boundaries of the U.N. regulatory charter. The charter is hardwired into my systems, so in effect I have as much to fear from the police as a human does.

A weapon—any weapon—is a tool, she told us. Cradled in her arms was a Sunjet particle gun. Designed for a specific purpose, just as any tool is, and only useful in that purpose. You would think a man a fool to carry a force hammer with him everywhere simply because he is an engineer

think, Raquel, you'd cut the laugh out of a toddler's throat with a blunt scalpel if you thought you could sell it for cab fare.

Machine idiolect. It doesn't matter how sophisticated they get, they still end up sounding like a playgroup learning box. I sighed and looked directly ahead at the slice-of-virtual-life holos on the wall. "You want out, now'd be a good time to tell me." "I do not want out, Takeshi Kovacs. I merely wished to acquaint you with the considerations involved in this course of action." "Okay. I'm acquainted.