21 quotes found
“You have to live to really know things, my love”
“In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.”
“The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.”
“The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals.”
“There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.”
“It no longer matters who consider themselves the masters of events. Events no longer obey their masters.”
“They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls.”
“In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.”
“Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion”
“... you "met" this Moneta ... or whatever her real name is ... in her past but your future ... in a meeting that's still to come”
“Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of green lips. Martin, Martin, Martin, she said, the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenbergs da...”
“in Theo quiet, efficient Theo to get him through the morning. Trusting in luck to get him through the day. Trusting in the drinking at Ciceros to get him through the night. Trusting in the unimpo...”
“When you've spent thirty years entering rooms filled with strangers you feel less pressure than when you've had only half that number of years of experience. You know what the room and the people i...”
“Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see ...”
“She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, hi...”
“Look, said Tyrena. In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion uni...”
“All those before us have gone into the darkness without assurance of logic or fact or persuasive theory, with only a slender thread of hope or all too shakable convention of faith. And they have be...”
“Sol wanted to know how any ethical system much less a religion so indomitable that it had survived every evil mankind could throw at it could flow from a command from God for a man to slaughter h...”
“The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and...”
“The Chinese poet George Wu ... recorded on his comlog: "Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to his lover the...”
“... a comment with the idle arrogance common of such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.”
