She’d tried being alone with her thoughts once, but had never tried it again. It had been too dull. (BOS)
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The more you faced the light the brighter is grew, and one day for the brief respite that it brought you’d look over your shoulder. And you’d see how lovely and rich and dark and beguiling your shadow had become … (BOS)
Knowing how bad you could be is a great encouragement to being good. (BOS)
… the smug face of virtue triumphant could almost be as horrible as wickedness revealed. (BOS)
Even squirrels deserved their privacy, the dirty little devils. (BOS)
… there is no point in being the official bad person if you play by the rules. (BOS)
For according to the trollish philosopher Plateau, ‘if you want to understan’ an enemy, you gotta walk a mile in his shoes. Den, if he’s still you enemy, at least you’re a mile away and he’s got no shoes.’ (BOS)
The traditional enmity between dwarfs and trolls has been explained away by one simple statement: one species is made of rock, the other is made of miners. But in truth the enmity is there because no one can remember when it wasn’t, and so it continues because everything is done in completely justifiable revenge for the revenge that was taken in response to the revenge for the vengeance that was taken earlier, and so on. Humans never do this sort of thing, much. (BOS)
No one like a child who pays attention too hard, whose eyes follow your every move, and who listens very carefully to everything you say. It’s like talking to a great big bottomless ear. (BOS)
When people talk about their great past they’re usually trying to excuse their mediocre present. (BOS)
‘… you can’t start with a democracy. You have to work up through stuff like tyranny and monarchy first. That way people are so relieved when they get to democracy that they hang on to it.’ (BOS)
‘I thought you told me a dimocracy was where people did what they wanted to do,’ she said.
‘It’s a democracy,’ I said. ‘And it’s fine for people to do what they want to do, provided they do what’s right.’ (BOS) That’s the thing about time-travel, you’ve got all the time in the world. (BOS)
It’s just like I’ve always said – women have always had a greater stake in technology than have men. We’d still be living in trees, otherwise. Piped water, electric lighting, stoves that you don’t need to shove wood into – I reckon that behind half the great inventors in history were their wives, nagging them into fiding a cleaner way of doing the chores. (BOS)
There’s no slavery as such, except to tradition, but tradition wields a heavy lash. I mean, maybe democracy isn’t perfect, but at least we don’t let ourselves be outvoted by the dead. (BOS)
You shouldn’t turn in on yourself. It’s not what being human means. You got to reach out. (BOS)
… as though they were alive and dead at the same time, like Cliff Richard. (BOS)
Nothing serious has bits of apple floating in it. (BOS)
Where does a seven-foot barbarian hero go? Dogger thought. Wherever he likes. (BOS)
There is a blissful period of existence which the Yen Buddhists* call plinki. It is defined precisely as the interval between waking up and being hit on the back of the head by all the problems that kept you awake the night before; it ends when you realize that this was the morning everything was going to look better in, and it doesn’t.
* Like Zen Buddhists, only bigger begging bowls. (BOS) ‘If you could read I’d send you a postcard, if I could write.’ (BOS)
She didn’t look like a mass murderer, but Linsay recalled that mass murderers never did. (LE)
‘Mankind isn’t really evil. It hasn’t got enough dignity to be evil.’ (LE)
Linsay was a left ear person, Valiente realised. He had seen plenty of them: their eyes glazed slightly and they stared fixedly at your left ear, while their mouths spouted the truth about flying saucers, the great world conspiracy, or one-born-every-minute evangelism. Inside everyone was a left ear person waiting to get out. (LE)
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