History is what we write, not what we remember. Why should we tarnish the memory of our planet by enshrining our less then noble deeds?

You worry that we’re becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn’t make us any worse.

The cards always look different when it’s your turn to play them; loaded with subtly different possibilities.

There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the...

Even monsters are beautiful.

A city’s only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.

Victory loses its meaning without the memory of what you’ve vanquished.

To see something marvellous with your own eyes – that’s wonderful enough. But when two of you see it, two of you together, holding hands, holding each other close, knowing that you’ll both have that...

An idea so dangerous it can’t be discussed. I thought we buried all that nonsense back in the Dark Ages.

Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.

It is always better to try and fail than not to try.

For a moment I think we were turned into information, and that in that instant we were linked to every other piece of information ever known; every thought ever thought, or at least ever captured...

reading”.

I don’t know.” That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed.

Dimly–at first wary that it was merely a dislodged fragment of the dream–she remembered Resurgam. And then, slowly, events returned, not as a tidal wave, or even as as landslide, but as a slow, squelching...

Sluka shook her head. “We’re talking about them in the past tense, and we never even discussed them in the present. It’s like their only reason for existing was so they could die.

Still, it was vision, or at least vision’s idiot cousin.

You don’t usually think of boredom as something similar to pain. That’s because you’ve only been exposed to it in relatively small doses. You don’t know its true colour. The difference between the boredom you...

At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred...

Nothing had ever existed between us except the possibility of something, and now even that was over.

The human capacity for grief. It just isn’t capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn’t just level off—it just gives up, resets itself...

But you will come to regret this, Abigail. This won’t be like one of the memories that fritters away into nothing when you come out of that game. This will leave a stain. You’ll carry...

That she had loved Sylveste because he was such a self-important bastard and made something noble of being a self-important bastard, did it with such utter aplomb that it became a kind of virtue, like...

Humanity is an assemblage of information-processing entities, and in that regard you have potential.

It’s called optimism — but I’m losing the hang of it fast.

Mathematics is a terrible calling. It’s as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There’s a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in...

Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies...

You’re confident he’ll have found him, then?””Well, no. I didn’t sat that.””If there’s one thing I hate,” Volyova said, looking coldly at the other Triumvir, “it’s mindless optimism.

Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference.’ Floyd flashed him a smile. ‘It won’t last for ever.

It’s not how far you’ve come that matters. It’s where you’ve come from.

There’s such a thing as free will, Tanner. You didn’t have to go along with me, unless you want to admit your brain is ruled by your dick. And I didn’t get the impression you...

Without risk in our lives, we’re scarcely better than machines ourselves.

So much for the tolerant acceptance of the other. We’re forging out into deep space – who knows what we’ll meet out there? If we can’t even accept a robot and some talking elephants, what...