"It had to be one or the other. Did it have to be one or the other? Even the question as to whether it had to be one or the other had to be one or the other!"

"“It’s not right. A human being is a human being. A human being is not a toy.” “We cannot help but use the people below us as a resource, my love,” said her two MOHmies, as one. “That is what it means to be in power. Your choice is to relinquish power forever, or to accept that and use people for good.”... “If we are powerful,” sang her MOHmies, “we can make things better, but we are made unclean by the fact that we have power. If we are powerless we remain clean, but we cannot make things better.”"

"“I shouldn’t be naive” Diana said. “Of course, realising its destructive power only makes them want it more. Of course. Even more than great wealth, power craves technologies of destruction. Good to be wealthy, but better to remain in power—and the more awe-inspiring the weaponry at your disposal, the better able you are to do that.”"

"“I have heard the rumours,” said the captain, directing his attention to the food on his plate. “Ah, but rumours,” said Lebret easily, “may not be trusted. Appearances, you see, can trump reality.”"

"“You must register your disagreement, must you Monsieur?” he said, in a level voice. “Consider it registered. Consider it simultaneously disregarded.”"

"It could be any one of a dozen things. Experience has taught me that we much more often see connection where there is only random copresence. Pattern-seeking consciousness, you know. Great plains ape, you know."

"Diana got that seventh-sense intimation that she had touched on an unmentionable matter; although a strangely involuted one whereby the fact that it was unmentionable was itself unmentionable."

"That a human being had died did not distress her. Had it been somebody she knew it would have upset her; she wasn’t a monster. Had it been somebody she cared about. But it was nobody she knew, and it would have been disingenuous to pretend that the death of somebody she didn’t know affected her on an emotional level."

"The motives that explained human murder bunched, historically, into three groups: material gain; personal grudge and sociopathy."

"She didn’t have to believe the technology existed. She only had to believe that people believed the technology existed. People, being stupid, believed all sorts of things."

"“Do you know what this is? “The floor, Miss?” “Dust! I read about it—tiny particles of matter.”"

"As far as dreams were concerned—well dreams are generated by the random processes of neural oscillation during the brain’s rest phases. What dreams do is cycle and recycle images and feelings, rationalisations and fears. There’s nothing special about that. It’s not the dreams that matter (chaff, mental turbulence, the rotating metal bars moving endlessly through the transparent tub of metaphorical slushy). It is what the problem-solving circuits in the mind make of the dreams. Dreams iterate and test mental schemas, discarding the maladaptive to return the adaptive to the slush to be reworked. Dreams are emotional preparations for solving problems—that is why we have evolved them, because problem-solving abilities are highly adaptive and thus strongly evolutionarily selected. Dreams intoxicate the individual out of reliance on common sense and preconception, and tempt her into the orbit of private logic. Dreams have utility."

"She had expected to encounter death as a kind of existential depth and had been disappointed. But maybe there was a deeper truth there. Maybe profundity actually is a mode of disappointment. The rhythm of the climax—joy and despair, sex and pain—is of course the currency of life. Death can only ever be a sort of anticlimactic belatedness."

"People-problems did not interest her. Data seemed to her a larger, purer, more transcendent quantity than Homo sapiensness. Human-to-human interactions were, effectively, all just politics, and politics bored her."

"One of the curiosities of anger, of course, is that the more you focus it outward, firing it at the injustices of the world, the more it actually parses your own self-pity and resentment."

"His last hours alive. But he didn’t know! None of us will know, of course. The weird grammar of death. You die, he or she dies, they die, but there is no genuine form for “I”. Not really. All know that, none know when."

"Let us not entirely abandon Occam’s Razor! The possible, no matter how unlikely, is always to be preferred to the impossible, however appealing."

"Have you never seen human beings acting in a mob-frenzy? Have you never seen a religious rite that tipped people over the edge? Did you not see footage of the rock-and-roll music concerts they have in America?"

"She thought of the multitude. Trillions of human beings, wrappend like a fog about their home star. The mind collapsed at the scale and the numbers. But if ethics meant anything at all, it meant not letting the largeness of the human population overwhelm our moral knowledge that life is lived individually, and that even when agglomerated into billions and trillions individual human beings deserve better han being used as tools. That the overwhelming majority of this vast mass of humanity was poor, living precariously and subsistence lives in leaky shanty bubbles, eating ghunk and drinking recycled water—this made this more, not less, true. These were the people least able to help themselves. Thery should be helped, not exploited."

"Money is not our concern. Our concern is the sea. The sea is not persuaded by bankers’ drafts and stocks of bullion; the sea respects nothing but the grit and willpower of dedicated seamen."

"What a bloody jungle income tax is! It's a wonder we don't all go on strike and refuse to pay."

"More tears. Disgraceful. I was getting just like Kester, weeping at the drop of a hat, but of course I was Kester. I'd become him, and now there was just this other stranger who wrote me debonair notes and who sounded just like me."

"'He wasn't just being selfish, he was being realistic. Marriage would have been very difficult if not downright impossible.'"

"True doppelgängers should never meet face-to-face, you know."

"'I could always walk out on a husband. But I could never turn my back on a friend.'"

"Distrust grows out of lies. Wrong-doing grows out of distrust. Tragedy grows out of wrong-doing. But out of honesty grows love and love's so powerful, it'll be like a suit of armour, protecting Robert, protecting you."

"Christ, all you psychiatrists think about is sex — sex, sex, sex, sex, sex ..."

"'... we have to be kind, we have to be charitable and we can't condemn people just because they get in a mess...even the best people can get into ghastly messes,...we must never judge other people too harshly because although they can make awful mistakes they can still be very nice people.'"

"'Little girls don't stay playmates. Little girls become big girls and big girls become sweethearts.'"

"'Barbarity's everywhere, that's the truth of it. Absolutely anyone is capable of absolutely anything.' 'My dear Papa, I had no idea you were such a cynic!' 'That's not cynicism, that's honesty — as you well know, dealing with criminals as you do, seeing the human race continually at its worst.'"

"'I deserve to be thought a coward. I am a coward. I'm just so bloody afraid of dying — of losing —'"

"Death had won my three friends; Death had almost won me. But now I was the one who was going to win and I was going to win by outwitting Death over and over again ... To compete with Death, as I had discovered in the mountains, was to know one was alive."

"Every woman needs a special friend of her own sex with whom she can 'have a haircombing' about everything from menstruation to male monsters, and Julie had become that kind of special friend."

"“You’re just doing that to pass the time,” said Davide, dismissively. “Just to pass the time,” agreed Jac. “Though I suppose time will pass, in any case, regardless of what I do.”"

"Life's for living, not for mourning ... Live in the present, not the past."

"'The English don't have opinions about the Irish. They have prejudices.'"

"'To be distracted is pardonable. To be incoherent is simply unobliging.'"

"'Friendship's best,' I said, 'and friendship's forever because no baby can come along to spoil it.'"

"'Success on that scale don't make for happiness. Look at Asquith. Why does he drink? I wouldn't want you to end up a drunkard like that.'"

"Again, be patient. And have courage. Remember, everything passes, even the most unspeakable horrors."

"One must be rational about such matters and being rational need not mean being cold."

"Romance is the opiate of the dissatisfied, it anaesthesises them from the pain of their disordered second-rate lives [...] If romance is the opiate of the dissatisfied then surely nostalgia is the opiate of the disillusioned, for those who see all their dreams come true and find themselves living in a nightmare."

"'Acquiring carnal knowledge is like swimming in the sea ... The sea's so beautiful to look at, so wonderful to swim in, but you must never bathe unless it's safe. People so often drown in the sea and some coasts are so very dangerous, ... like the Coast of Gower.'"

"'But never mind, all the best heroines are beautiful orphans, abandoned to their fate, and the one thing that's certain about my situation is that I'm going to be a heroine when I grow up.' 'Can I be a hero?' 'Well, I suppose you can try. But you'll have to try very hard.'"

"A rational disposition must necessarily preclude a romantic outlook in life, and only the failures of this world can afford to dispense with a rational disposition."

"Recovering from an ill-starred romance is, after all, to anyone of sufficient will-power and self-respect, purely an attitude of mind."

"Boredom on social occasions is an inescapable hazard for the over-educated, and for the over-ambitious it must be endured."

"Man cannot live on charm alone, and an ambitious man cannot live on anything less than wealth, good social connections and substantial political influence."

"'There are standards of immorality as well as standards of morality, Robert. Make sure yours are high.'"

"Sexual desire has to be dead as a doornail before a man and a woman can be genuinely at peace in a platonic relationship."