Quotes from Richard K. Morgan

He storms down in savage joy, to meet all the waiting blades and hate.

Forget uniforms or nominal allegiances—if it wears a weapon and scars, it's no safer than the next starving wild dog. Feed and water with care, walk like you're carrying dragon eggs, and never, never get between rival packs.

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. And as it is with engineers, so it is doubly with Envoys.

There isn't actually any escape. Once you understand this, you are empowered.

It was beginning to feel practised.

Conscious thought doesn't have much to do with this stuff. Doesn't have much to do with the way we live our lives, period, if you believe the psychologists. A bit of rationalization, most of it with hindsight. Put the rest down to hormonal drives, gene instinct, and pheromones for the fine-tuning. Sad, but true.

There were always the stories, of course, the war legends, but who— other than himself, in Jhesh's tavern, increasingly wearily—still told those?

If I know anything about stack engineers, they'll weld down the lid on your remote stack faster than politicians leaving a war zone.

I twitched a smile, resisting the temptation to kick his teeth down his throat, and folded myself into the deck chair.

To recommend change, as this report does, is not to suggest that the problems we address will disappear or no longer require attention. At most they will disappear from view, and this may very well be a counterproductive outcome, since it cannot fail to encourage a complacency we can ill-afford.

The odds are pretty good in favour of no one ever finding you. Space, as textbooks are given to saying, is big.

There's a general hate in the hearts of men. You went to war, Gil, you should know that better than anyone. It's like the heat of the sun. Men like Kaad are just the focal figures, like lenses to gather the sun's rays on kindling. You can smash a lens, but that won't put out the sun.

The fragmented contents of the previous night bubbled in my brain like a carelessly made fish stew. Indigestible chunks appeared on the surface, wobbled in the currents of memory, and sank again.

You'd think, given a planet nine-tenths covered in water and a solar system with no other habitable biospheres, that people would be careful with that real estate.

Mais souvenez-vous de la faiblesse des armes. Ce ne sont que des extensions. Vous êtes le tueur et le destructeur. Vous êtes complet, avec ou sans elles.

You'd think they'd develop an intelligent approach to land allocation and use. You'd think they wouldn't fight stupid little wars over large areas of useful terrain, wouldn't deploy weaponry that would render the theater of operations useless to human habitation for centuries to come.

The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions: artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazard-proof bodywork, which most cyberengineering firms designed to spec for the task at hand.

These days, one of them told me one freezing slow-as-Sunday night, we're all just feeding off the stored fat of a dream gone bad.

That's how you fight wars, after all—with soldiers who are more afraid of stepping out of line than they are of dying on the battlefield.

they stand at his back on the cold - he can feel them there now - like new gods. like a fresh pantheon waiting to be born. It was warm, by the fire.

The eyes, set in jet skin, were a startling pale green. Kadmin had freed himself from conventional perceptions of the physical. In an earlier age, he would have been a shaman; here, the centuries of technology had made him more. An electronic demon, a malignant spirit that dwelled in altered carbon and emerged only to possess flesh and wreck havoc.

Kadmin had freed himself from conventional perceptions of the physical. In an earlier age, he would have been a shaman; here, the centuries of technology had made him more. An electronic demon, a malignant spirit that dwelled in altered carbon and emerged only to possess flesh and wreak havoc.

They're brutal, moronic, they have the ethical consciousness of apes and the initiative levels of sheep. But you took the field against the reptiles for them nonetheless. Why?" Ringil

The skeins are tangled. Some butterfly shaman up in the north beats his puny fucking wings and the storm gathers before you know it. Chaos gathers, like a bad poet's verse. We run damage control, but the rules of engagement have changed. You think we're any happier about it than you? We've got our balls to the wall here, hero. We're fighting half blind, nothing works, not the way it should, not anymore. Which