"I sold my soul for knowledge of the future, only to have that very pact render me forever ignorant (Gerald Tarrant)."
- C.S. Friedman
"All about us were people. Perhaps a hundred. Men. Experience had taught me that humans were cruelest when segregated by sex, and the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach became led. What had I let my..."
"anger of any kind is a dangerous emotion, it eats at the nerves and eventually makes you careless"
"Connecting to the outernet was less of a shock this time, as the monitor gave him a sense of distance from it, but it was still annoying. How did these people live with such a system, stalked by adver..."
"The Tyr had tried. It had really tried. It must have gone over every element of human psychology, tried desperately to understand the nature of human aesthetic sense … and then failed, miserably, in e..."
"Sometimes the decision is placed in your hands and you just have to go with it, right or wrong, according to what you think is best."
"It struck Hsing suddenly that Masada didn't even understand the nature of his own genius. To him the patterns of thought and motive that he sensed in the virus were self-explanatory, and those who cou..."
"Civilized man longs for the illusion of barbarism. Either his culture fulfills this need by adopting its outer trappings, or he will be seduced by his first contact with a culture that does."