Quotes from Richard K. Morgan

You can't talk to people like that. Soldiers, corporate execs, politicians. All you can do is kill them, and even that rarely makes things any better. They just leave their shit behind, and someone else to carry on.

War is like any other bad relationship. Of course you want out, but at what price? And perhaps more importantly, once you get out, will you be any better off? QUELLCRIST FALCONER Campaign Diaries

The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine. Reality doesn't offer this assurance, so it's very easy to develop the mistaken impression that you're in control.

Childishness is a common enough sin amongst humans. Perhaps we should not be so quick to judge.

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.

Dig down into the blood depths of hormonal bedrock, where violence and sex and power grow fibrously entwined. It's a murky, complicated place down there. No telling what you'll drag up once you start excavating.

Anyone who builds satellites we can't shoot down needs to be taken seriously and, if they ever come back for their hardware, be approached with caution. That's not religion, it's common sense. Quellcrist Falconer Metaphysics for Revolutionaries

Wardani had donned the emotional equivalent of a vacuum suit, the only response left in the human armory when the moral parameters of the outside environment have grown so outrageously variable that an exposed mind can no longer survive unshielded.

Humans, short- lived and locked out of the gray places for life, do not do well with uncertainty. If they cannot have what might, what could, what should, and perhaps most awful of all what should have been, then they will dream it up instead, imagine it into being in whatever twisted or beautiful form suits, and then drive their fellows to their knees in chains by the thousand and million to pretend in chorus that it is so.

So where the fuck are you, Isaac? I can hear your breathing, I just need to see you so I can stop it.

Look," the Ryker copy said, "I'm you. I know everything you know. What's the harm in talking about this stuff?" "If you know everything I know, what's the point of talking about it?" "Sometimes, it helps to externalize things. Even if you talk to someone else about it, you're usually talking to yourself. The other guy's just providing a sounding board. You talk it out.

Fortified with self-loathing, with the reserves of sardonic contempt he'd absorbed in his time spent around Milacar, he'd gone to the gate tight-lipped and filled with a strange, queasy energy, as if walking to his own execution as well as Jelim's. He'd known at some deep, cold level that he would cope. He was wrong. Utterly.

Do I look like a fucking slave to you? he asked them. And though, finally, they would bring him down with sheer weight of numbers, none who heard him ask that question lived to see the dawn.

She said, I have no excuses, least of all for God. Like all tyrants, he is not worthy of the spit you would waste on negotiations. The deal we have is infinitely simpler—I don't call him to account, and he extends me the same courtesy.

No way. You won't catch Notley working weekends. Calls it the American disease, working all the hours God sends you.

The eyes are dim, but a single bright glimmer tracks down one weathered cheek. Ringil— Gil shakes his head. 's okay. Thanks for the krin. Going to be a big help. He slings the Ravensfriend up and over his shoulder, walks away from the god and down the slope towards the waiting dwenda. After all , he calls back. Worse fates than being forced into a place where your choice of acts is limited to those where your soul burns brightest .

What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me.

An-Kirilnar is." The Helmsman stopped dead, so abruptly that it took her a moment to realize there were no more words coming. Flicker of shifting light across the optics, there and gone. But this time she saw it for certain. "Angfal?" "Quests are pretexts, Archeth. They are tales told, narrative blankets to wrap you against the cold you cannot bear.

You don't trust me?' 'Now you come to mention it, no. But that isn't it.

The way I see it, anyone who's proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn't read enough history yet.

The human race has dreamed of heaven and hell for millennia. Pleasure or pain unending, undiminished, and uncurtailed by the strictures of life or death. Thanks to virtual formatting, these fantasies can now exist. All that is needed is an industrial-capacity power generator. We have indeed made hell—and heaven—on earth.

Religion's just politics with higher stakes, Tak. You know that, you saw it in action on Sharya. No reason these people can't do the same when it comes to the crunch. These people are sheep. They'll do whatever their holy men tell them.

In the end, she realized, he had successfully invited them all to die simply by promising to do it with them. It was all they would ask of any commander.

See, once upon a time," Yavuz was saying, "fear was a unifying force. Back then, you could make a country strong with xenophobia. That's the old model, the nation-state fortress thing. But you can't live in a fortress when your whole way of life depends on globalized interdependence and trade. Once that happens, xenophobic tendency becomes a handicap, in Groombridge's terms a non-adaptive trait.