Transition Quotes
"Thinking is what I do best, perhaps. Thinking is what we do best, too. As a species, I mean. It is our forte, our speciality, our superpower; that which has raised us above the common herd."
"How wonderful to have the luxury of undisturbed thought."
"In plain sight or secreted away, there are always many, many places to hide where they’ll never think to look."
"We sort ourselves out, do we not? You lot there, this lot here; even in the great melting-pot cities we generally order ourselves into little enclaves and districts where we gain a comfort from a shared background or culture."
"You can go a long way just telling people what they want to hear."
"I sit back again, adjusting my legs in the voluminous salwars so that they are precisely in line with the X of legs supporting the little table."
"Amazing what you can accomplish by applying yourself and making yourself useful."
"I am not ashamed to say that I cried quite a lot throughout the rest of that night, though I still dropped off to sleep eventually and got up for school the next day, because it is amazing what you can put up with and get over. Almost anything, in fact."
"There is a certain purity to my existence. A simplicity."
"We live in an infinity of infinities, and we reshape our lives with every passing thought and each unconscious action, threading an ever-changing course through the myriad possibilities of existence."
"Life’s a game and whoever dies with the most toys wins."
"If all you ever care about is money, money is all that will ever care for you."
"We need to see things the way they really are to us."
"No amount of success frees you of all problems."
"I never fully appreciate being gay, but at least I haven’t hit the ground counting the cracks in the parquet flooring."
"It is because I do not enjoy it that I am good at it."
"I have had colleagues who have been impatient to cause the maximum amount of pain and damage. They are, in the end, inefficient."
"If you’re unconscious you’re unconscious – so by no means in full control of what your body is doing."
"Ah, the infinite cowardice of the torturer," I mutter.
"I could have been wrong. I might have misheard or misunderstood."
"I was talking to the man who had shot and killed my little pirate captain."
"Her charges against us must be defended, her argument broken."
"I am hanging forward in the seat as far as my bonds will allow."
"I’ve never heard of it. Where the hell are we?"
"I can’t imagine why she would have thought that."
"I think you know exactly what I was saying, Tem."
"But, faced with such flattering attention from on high, confronted with such a powerful regard from somebody who had taken such trouble to make themselves so formidably if ostentatiously attractive, there was no part of him that was not responding enthusiastically."
"Blood might be thicker than water but it’s no match for liquidity, know what I mean?"
"There’s no 'us' in commitment, I’d tell them, there’s just a 'me.'"
"Any argument or point of view that makes solipsism look no less likely may be discounted."
"You can’t have a state where torture is legal, not for anything."
"We find ourselves fighting on two fronts, ma'am. That is not supportable."
"What does not kill you can leave you maimed."
"We help societies across the many worlds, aiding and advancing positive, progressive forces and confounding and disabling negative, regressive ones."
"Good is good. Specific people and societies benefit."
"If you feel sorry for a beggar you still give them money even though doing so does nothing for the plight of all other beggars."
"We have access to an infinite number of worlds."
"The world exists without us, whether we like it or not."
"To a true solipsist there is no distinction between objective and subjective truth."
"Subjectivity is all that matters because it is effectively all that exists."
"One has to ask what this has done to their outlook."
"Interventions were rare, much argued and agonised over, heavily monitored and subject to extensive subsequent analysis."
"Unless we have been lied to even more comprehensively than even I suspect, the Concern has existed for a thousand years."
"The steps to the grave grow steeper the closer you approach."
"The longer you keep gambling everything the more certain you are to lose it."
"Part of the function of ageing and dying is to let the next generation have its say."
"Power always drives to perpetuate itself, but this is a phenomenal extra distillation of idiocy."
"They always think they’re both profoundly indispensable and uniquely right."
"But quate appy to use this poor damaged creatchah for your own dimmed ignoble ends, midim. Ain’t dat de trute!"
"Poor damaged creatchah, poor damaged creatchah…"
"Bingo! Bandits ahoy, chumlets! Thar she blows!"