Quotes from Richard K. Morgan

When you don't like the laws, you go somewhere they can't touch you. And then you make up some of your own.

We look back and see a path we have taken through life. It's tempting to think that the path was always there, laid out with purpose and waiting only for us to walk it.

They killed us twenty thousand years ago with their crops and their craven connivance at hierarchy.

Yes, and had your hotel proved slightly less psychotic, matters would never have got as far out of hand as they have.

And for the moments that the embrace lasted, and a little while after, I felt as clean as the breeze coming in off the sea.

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.

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

Around us, the tourist crowd ebbed and flowed like the multicolored idiot tide it was.

Part of running a successful tyranny is knowing when and how to let your subjects off the leash, and at this the First Families were accomplished masters.

the truth was far more complex, and ultimately far more scary. But who in this universe wants the truth?

The police are more impressive by night. First of all, you've got the flashing lights casting dramatic color into everyone's faces, grim expressions steeped alternately in criminal red and smoky blue.

Served up through the id-feeding Technicolor TV drip that passed for national news coverage, he was just new dosage in a regime already 150 years screen-ingrained.

On Harlan's World, streetlife has a stripped-back elegance to it, an economy of motion and gesture that feels almost like choreography if you're not used to it. I grew up with it, so the effect doesn't register until it's not there any more.

Residual biosystems glitches, they said, and told me it'd fade with time. I believed them, because in the end almost everything does.

You'll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have.

He picked one at random, a luridly violent far-future crime novel about a detective who could seemingly exchange bodies at will, but the subject matter was alien to him and his attention drifted. It all seemed very far-fetched.

Every evening, the Strip flickers to languid life like some faulty neon tube given a kick. It blinks and fizzles and settles down, gleaming slantwise and constant across the street grid of Bradbury's old quarter like a cryptic grin, like a signal for eager moths.

Which part of get the fuck out didn't you understand, hard man?" I got the fuck out.

It's not parole." The corps' deep-cover training came rocketing in across my mind like a flight of low-level strike jets, spinning vapor-trail lies on the edge of plausibility and half-known detail. Something inside me tilted with the joy of mission time. "You know what I went down for?

Already on course for the door, I made no attempt to detour in their direction, and this must have occurred to them only when I was halfway across the hall. Two of them drifted over to intercept me with the easy calm of big cats that have been fed recently.

I hesitated, pretending to weigh it up. "What's the deal in the bar?" "Ha ha ha." Someone had programmed a laugh into the robot. It sounded like a fat man drowning in syrup.

The sunglasses were jammed on a nose you could have opened cans on.

Incessant junk rhythm music thrashed the air as if this was the ventricle of some massive heart on tetrameth.

His companions stared at me like frightened children as I came down the stairs, like I'd come down to them on Pachamama's Own Ladder to the Firmament—some dark spirit too tarnished and twisted with sin to make it through, barred at the top by divine Inti's doormen, found corrupt and wanting, and thrown back down from paradise among the stars.