Novelists From Scotland

"“His opinion was: ‘as a challenge, without peer. As music, without merit.’”"

"We only become beasts—we become worse than beasts—when we torment others."

"“One does not spy on one’s own people,” ZeSpiole informed him. “One has, rather, conduits of communication which lead to the common man.”"

"On the other hand it could have been worse. And arguably one way of making it worse would be to admit just how badly things had actually gone."

"People often behave badly when they are trying to prove a point."

"Old equals sneaky."

"Oh, yeah, this Ziller guy. Some spoiled, fur-rending liberal brat who thinks it’s his God-given duty to do the whining for those who can’t be bothered whining for themselves."

"There is an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it."

"“I had formed the impression the Protector valued your counsel.” “It is most valued when it most closely accords with his own view.”"

"They had faith and so would do things that were plainly not in their own immediate (or, often, long-term) best interests, because they just believed what they had been told."

"It rarely paid to frighten the masses, and it never paid to confuse them."

"“Quettil, it doesn’t matter,” the King said airily, waving one hand. “I prefer accuracy to flattery.”"

"We are largely the sum of all we’ve done, and to dispose of that knowledge would be to stop being one’s self."

"There is always the right of the strong to take the weak and the rich to take the poor and the powerful to take those who have no power. UrLeyn may have written down our laws and changed a few of them, but the laws that still bind us to the animals cut the deepest. Men compete for power, they strut and parade and they impress their fellows with their possessions and they take the women they can. None of that has changed. They may use weapons other than their hands and teeth, they may use other men and they may express their dominance in money, not other symbols of power and glamour, but..."

"But there we are. Some things never do make perfect sense. There must be some explanation, and it is perhaps a little like the Doctrine of the Perfect Partner. We must be content to know that she exists, somewhere in the world, and try not to care overmuch that we will probably never meet her."

"The majority of species, too, could scrape together some sort of metaphysical framework, a form of earlier speculation – semi-deranged or otherwise – regarding the way things worked at a fundamental level which could later be held up as a philosophy, life-rule system or genuine religion, especially if one used the excuse that it was really only a metaphor, no matter how literally true it had declared itself to be originally."

"“Anyway,” she said. “I’m sorry.” “Indeed. I can see contrition oozing from your every pore.”"

"To a gun, all problems resolved into what could be shot at."

"“Then what,” Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar’s obvious enthusiasm, “is making you smile about a disaster?” “Well, first, I didn’t cause it! Nothing to do with me; hands clean. Always a bonus."

"Pain, or even just discomfort, is like the warning sent by a frontier guard, sir. You are free to choose to ignore it, but you should not be unduly surprised if you are subsequently over-run by invaders."

"You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing."

"“I hear what you say,” Prin told him, keeping calm.… “It’s nonsense, of course, but it is interesting to know that you hold such views.”"

"“See if you can hold off this pack of blood-sucking scavengers. Here’s my duelling sword.” The King handed me his own sword! “You have full permission to use it on anyone who looks remotely like a physician.”"

"The meeting was a benign environment; potentially just as tremendously boring as war, but without the slivers of utter terror stuck in there as well."

"Hell was always for other people."

"Prin let the old one witter on. They could make him stay in here, stop him from leaving and stop him from offering any violence to this dream-image of the old representative, but they couldn’t stop his attention from wandering. The techniques learned in lecture theatres and later honed to perfection in faculty meetings were proving their real worth at last. He could vaguely follow what was being said without needing to bother with the detail. When he’d been a student he had assumed he could do this because he was just so damn smart and basically already knew pretty much all they were trying to teach him. Later, during seemingly endless committee sessions, he’d accepted that a lot of what passed for useful information-sharing within an organisation was really just the bureaucratic phatic of people protecting their position, looking for praise, projecting criticism, setting up positions of non-responsibility for up-coming failures and calamities that were both entirely predictable but seemingly completely unavoidable, and telling each other what they all already knew anyway. The trick was to be able to re-engage quickly and seamlessly without allowing anyone to know you’d stopped listening properly shortly after the speaker had first opened their mouth."

"“Some of us prefer history to legends, lady,” DeWar said heavily, “and sometimes everybody can be wrong.”"

"Very quick deaths, even given that they would have been wired in and speeded up, if I may just leap in front of any nascent and entirely vicarious moral qualms you may be about to suffer from, tiny human. Military personnel, babe; put themselves in harm’s way when they signed up. Just that the poor fuckers didn’t know it was my harm they were putting themselves in the way of. That’s war, doll; fairness comes excluded."

"No! Get away from me, you wittering purple rogues! Away and become bankers the lot of you—admit what you really love!"

"Did the Doctor really imagine that everbody went around believing different things? One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher."

"Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place—and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all—so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time."

"Your position is perverse, farcical and as intellectually demeaning as it is morally destitute."

"The avatar laughed, raised his eyebrows at her. “Golly. What shall we do, Lededje?” She thought. “The smartest thing?” she suggested."

"“I suppose I’d only be exposing my hopeless naivety if I asked if there was some alternative to this.” “It would be more of a hopeless inability to come to terms with reality,” the avatar told her."

"How depressing, the Sleeper Service thought. That it should all come down to this; the person with the biggest stick prevails."

"The only sin is selfishness."

"“You’d make a great teenage boy,” she told the avatar. “I beg your pardon?” “You still think girls get moist when they hear arcane nomenclature. It’s sweet, I suppose.”"

"She supposed she ought to feel impressed that Genar-Hofoen was sticking to his principles in the face of imminent death—and she did feel a little admiration—but mostly she just thought he was being stupid."

"There now; cynical, paranoid and pessimistic. I think that completes the set, doesn’t it?"

"“I believe in Providence, mistress.” “But when you say Providence, do you really mean god?” “No, mistress. I don’t believe in any of the old gods. No one does any more. No one of sense, at any rate. Providence is the rule of laws, mistress,” I said."

"“Chay, you must be quiet now, and prepare to meet your maker.” “I had no maker. My maker was the universe, or my parents.”"

"Maybe it wasn’t anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or metaphilosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just...accounting."

"Backed up, tooled up, riled up. Time to waste something."

"Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated."

"Maybe it was immature to lust after revenge, but fuck that; let the fuckers die horribly. Well, let them die. She’d compromise that far. Evil wins when it makes you behave like it, and all that."

"That was another thing she taught me. That you are what you do. To Providence—or Progress or the Future or before any other sort of judgment apart from our own conscience—what we have done, not what we have thought, is the result we are judged by."

"I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters."

"They looked happy as zealots who’d just found a heathen to burn, Veppers thought. That was a little worrying."

"Filhyn smiled. “Is it not always better to tell the truth though, Representative?” Errun looked at her, shook his head. “The truth? No matter what? For good or ill? Are you mad? I do hope you’re having a joke with me here, young lady….Don’t pretend you are so naive, Filhyn. The truth is not always useful, not always good. It’s like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, elemental forces, the truth needs to be channelled, managed, controlled and intelligently, morally allocated.” He glared at her. “You are having a joke with me, aren’t you?” I might as well be, she thought. She wondered if she would finally be a real politician when she agreed with what Errun was saying."

"And what was glory but something that reduced the more there were of you to share it?"