Captain, the problem is not that I’m paranoid. The problem is that the universe keeps justifying my paranoia.
Confidence isn’t about knowing you’re right. Confidence is about knowing you can make it right.
Part of what makes us human is what we mean to other people, and what people mean to us. I miss meaning something to someone, having that part of being human.
She was my friend. Briefly, she was my lover. She was braver than I ever would have been in the moment of death. And I bet she was a hell of a shooting star.
If you’re the best that the Earth has got to offer, it’s time we bend over and get a tentacle right up the ass.
I have always found that there’s an inverse relationship between the number of people in a room and the amount of useful work that can be done.
Q’eeng had just attempted in the third dialect the traditional rightward schism greeting of “I offer you the bread of life,” but his phrasing and accent had transmuted the statement into “Let us violate cakes together.
Ensign Davis thought, Screw this, I want to live, and swerved to avoid the land worms. But then he tripped and one of the land worms ate his face and he died anyway.
Well, I miss my wife, you know,” I said. “But I also miss the feeling of, I don’t know, comfort. The sense you’re where you’re supposed to be, with someone you’re supposed to be with.
A church is an institution separate from the religion it serves. It’s filled with people. And you know how people are.
I propose a toast. Here’s to being right all the time. May God and history forgive us.” They all clinked glasses to that.
Occam’s razor theory of combat: The simplest way of kicking someone’s ass was usually the correct one.
In the next room, a very nice young lady, who happened to be completely naked, wanted me to tell her anything I could possibly remember about my seventh birthday party.
I’ve been told my liminal space is like the dark of the grave. But I think of it as the dark from the other end of life entirely. The dark of everything ahead, not everything behind.
Which is why Mom, when she’s being indiscreet, refers to the trophy room as the “vet’s office.” Because that’s where Dad brings people to take their balls.
There’s a saying: “May you live in interesting times.” To begin, it’s a curse. “Interesting” in this case uniformly means “Oh god, death is raining down upon us and we shall all perish wailing and possibly on fire.
Do your people have racists? People who believe they are inherently superior to all other types of intelligent people?” “We have some,” Sorvalh said. “They’re generally agreed to be idiots.
Anyway, I might have just gone on about porn too long.
That’s the human brain,” Attavio VI said. “It creates patterns when there aren’t any. Imagines causality when there is none. Imagines a narrative where none exists. It’s in the design of the brain itself. It’s primed to lie.” “And primed to believe the lie.
For two years, all you have to do is go where they tell you, stay behind your rifle, and kill and not be killed. It’s simple, but simple isn’t the same as easy.