The Player Of Games Quotes
"This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game."
"The man is a game-player called 'Gurgeh'. The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game."
"Somehow he had survived; he had not expected to."
"'Wake up, Gurgeh!' Yay laughed, alongside him."
"'It's infantile, Yay. Why fritter your time away with this nonsense?'"
"Gurgeh nodded slowly. 'So they say. So everybody else believes.'"
"'But every now and again, I do worry about losing; I think, what if there's some kid - especially some kid, somebody younger and just naturally more talented - out there, able to take that away from me. That worries me.'"
"'The game's the thing. That's the conventional wisdom, isn't it? The fun is what matters, not the victory.'"
"'Everything seems… grey at the moment, Chamlis. Sometimes I start to think I'm repeating myself, that even new games are just old ones in disguise, and that nothing's worth playing for anyway.'"
"'I… exult when I win. It's better than love, it's better than sex or any glanding; it's the only instant when I feel… real,' he said."
"Why not? See what our betters can come up with. What have I got to lose?"
"All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance."
"The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck."
"There is nothing intellectually inferior about using your hands to build something as opposed to using only your brain."
"All the best mechanistic games can be traced to civilizations lacking a relativistic view of the universe."
"The same lessons can be learned, the same skills acquired, at the only levels that really matter."
"All reality seemed to hinge on those infinitesimal bundles of meaning."
"He knew it was wrong; but he knew it was right, too."
"Better I had never been brought into being than forced to wander the Culture for ever, knowing what I've lost."
"Why couldn't he go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision…"
"The Culture had theoretical total freedom of information; the catch was that consciousness was private."
"Privacy; that brought a bitter laugh to his mouth, thinking of the privacy he'd had over the last few days and nights."
"Perhaps it had gone totally crazy and flown off into space; maybe it had taken seriously the old joke about Styglian enumerators, and had gone off to count all the grains of sand on a beach."
"A private aesthetic theory," Gurgeh admitted, a little more impressed; he'd never mentioned that to anybody.
"The fieldless machine made a show of looking around."
"It becomes true; it is willed into actuality."
"The game is used as an absolutely integral part of the power-system of the empire."
"Opinions in Contact differ over whether it is possible for even a game-player of your stature to compete successfully, just on general game-playing principles and a crash-course in the rules and practice."
"I don't want a gun-drone, Worthil," Gurgeh said.
"That, my dear old friend, has never been an excuse."
"He'd packed a few personal ornaments, and had the house copy his stock of still and moving pictures to the Limiting Factor's memory."
"Gurgeh was dumped naked into the lake, but hauled out spluttering by Hafflis's children."
"The ship didn't seem to want to start any conversations, either, which normally wouldn't have bothered Gurgeh, but now did."
"He simply could not work the biotechs out; they were just like lumps of carved, coloured vegetables, and they lay in his hands like dead things."
"He always felt rather foolish when he woke up, and he was glad there was nobody there to see him in the morning."
"He had done his own research into the Empire, reading its own histories and watching its explanatory recordings."
"These were the first real uniforms Gurgeh had ever seen, and he felt a strange, dizzying sensation when he saw them; a sense of displacement and foreignness as well as an odd mixture of dread and awe."
"Knowing what he did, he wasn't surprised at the way they acted towards him."
"He stumbled over the remote-drone, which was floating near the floor just behind him; he fell into rather than sat on the couch."
"He picked it up and opened the ribbon-tied packet, wondering who it might be from; anyone of several ladies on the Little Rascal, he imagined."
"A prison that is also a moral and behavioristic labyrinth, where one's progress is determined by one's actions and choices, reflects a society deeply invested in the idea of justice as a personal journey."
"The idea that a perfectly good person can walk free from a labyrinthine prison in a matter of days, while a totally bad person will never escape, offers a stark, poetic reflection on the nature of morality and redemption."
"The rich and powerful finding ways to circumvent the law is a universal theme, resonating with the notion that justice is often skewed by wealth and influence."
"The grandeur and ceremony of imperial welcomes and the intricate social hierarchies they represent speak to the enduring human fascination with power and status."
"The experience of being an outsider, trying to navigate and understand an alien culture, captures the universal challenge of confronting and adapting to the unfamiliar."
"The moment of kindness and human connection, when a character whispers encouragement to another in a fleeting, almost secret gesture, illustrates the profound impact of empathy and support."
"Groasnachek was like a great, flattened, spiky animal, awash with lights at night and hazy with its own heaped breath during the day."
"He had played better than it had thought possible."
"The Culture didn't use money as such, but it also didn't want to be too conspicuously extravagant with matter and energy, either."
"At least I don't have to talk to them. I really could not care less what they say."
"Blade cuts cloth, cloth wraps stone, stone dams water, water quenches fire, fire melts blade…"
"Life or death in a finger's twitch, a single nerve-pulse, just one perhaps not fully willed decision by some jealous irrelevant one-credit sick-head, a hundred millennia from home."
"Does this mean that I shan't die now, or that I shall?"
"I'm looking death in the face, staring at it through that little black hole, the little twisted tunnel in this alien's hand, and I'm waiting to feel fear."
"You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence."
"I am here to play the game and nothing else."
"You were just playing their parts. No malice involved."
"You're a babe amongst the carnivores out here."
"You didn't see the 'casts before you got here."
"They'd have to pay for the treatment themselves."
"He's been drinking; that's part of the smell."
"The penalty for murdering a woman is a year's hard labour, for an apex."
"If any of these people see your hands or face, you're dead."
"They're supposed to be strangled and their bodies presented to the Eugenics Council for a bounty."
"One in ten of the people he passed on the street would be treated for mental illness at some point in their lives."
"The whole area, it was about average for the greater city. The hospital was run by a charity, and many of the people working there were unpaid."
"It was an average-bad night, the drone informed him. The hospital was a little more crowded than usual because several ships of the Empire's war-wounded had come back recently from famous victories."
"He was standing in a small garden, dark and dusty and deserted, at the back of the hospital, hemmed in on all sides."
"The drone said it still had things it wanted to show him. It wanted him to see a place where down-and-outs slept; it thought it could get him into a prison as a visitor."
"'I want to go back; now!' he shouted, throwing back the hood."
"The machine started to reel off infant-mortality rates and life-expectancy figures, sex ratios, types of diseases and their prevalence in the various strata of society, average incomes."
"The ship told you a guilty system recognizes no innocents. I'd say it does. It recognizes the innocence of a young child, for example, and you saw how they treated that."
"In a sense it even recognizes the 'sanctity' of the body… but only to violate it. Once again, Gurgeh, it all boils down to ownership, possession; about taking and having."
"Hamin found the Culture's sexual mores even more fascinating. He was at once delighted and outraged that the Culture regarded homosexuality, incest, sex-changing, hermaphrodicy, and sexual characteristic alteration as just something else people did."
"'How can you own a planet?' Gurgeh shook his head."
"Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job; blind obedience would imply we are no more than robots."
"The Empire wanted to survive; it was like an animal, a massive, powerful body that would only let certain cells or viruses survive within it and as a matter of course killed off any and all others, automatically and unthinkingly."
"We are what we do, not what we think. Only the interactions count."
"What difference does it make whether a mind's made up of enormous, squidgy, animal cells working at the speed of sound, or from a glittering nanofoam of reflectors and patterns of holographic coherence, at lightspeed? Each is a machine, each is an organism, each fulfills the same task."
"You is what you done. Dynamic (mis)behaviourism, that's my creed."
"He's seen the worst that meatgrinder of a city could provide, and he just took it personally, and took his revenge."
"How much has the man still got to learn? What will he make of such knowledge? More to the point, what will it make of him?"
"I do hate obsessions. They're so… blinding, yes?"
"Nobody would ever trust him again if he went back on it."
"It would be best for all concerned if you let it be known as soon as possible you will retire after this game."
"Better he still feels there's something still to prove. It will do him no harm."
"I hope you understand how frank I've been with you, Jernau Gurgeh. It would be unfortunate if such honesty went unacknowledged, and unrewarded."
"It seemed the only fair - not to mention expedient - thing to do; let the lads have their fun, then impose order later and tidy the toys back in the box."
"Still no substitute for a real game, though."
"You'll embarrass us all if you play Nicosar and win."
"I wish I could remember whether I meant to kill Yomonul."
"Everything outside was just a setting and a background for the game."
"He had lost control of his own drug-glands; the mix of chemicals in his bloodstream had taken over."
"The game was irrelevant, therefore it could be allowed to mean everything."
"The point of the game was to win; nothing else mattered."
"He spent all day, every day, gazing intently at nothing, or feverishly studying replays of old games."
"The drone wouldn't have believed it, but twice it saw the man sitting with an expression of pain on his face, staring at nothing."
"The board became both Culture and Empire again."
"Image of their minds; a hologram of pure coherence, burning like a standing wave of fire across the board, a perfect map of the landscapes of thought and faith within their heads."
"He began the slow move that was defeat and victory together before he even knew it himself."