Look To Windward Quotes
"Near the time we both knew I would have to leave him, it was hard to tell which flashes were lightning and which came from the energy weapons of the Invisibles."
"When the flare died it left only a memory in the eye and the dull flickering of the fire inside the destroyer’s body."
"‘I can’t get to anywhere safer until the flyer gets here,’ I said quietly. ‘Neither of us can.’"
"‘You should go. Now, Worosei,’ he whispered. ‘You’re being stupid.’"
"The barges lay on the darkness of the still canal, their lines softened by the snow heaped in pillows and hummocks on their decks."
"Tonight you dance by the light of ancient mistakes!"
"All right then, no; I probably couldn’t. I’m flying it, but if I did anything really stupid the automatics would take over and haul us out of trouble."
"Of course, once these things are sent . . ."
"‘We try to learn,’ Tersono said quietly. ‘But still we make mistakes.’"
"To feel such shame for one’s own was, well, shameful."
"‘You don’t think I bait the humans too much, do you?’ ‘I think they enjoy it,’ Kabe said."
"‘It is sad to hate your own people so much, Ziller.’ ‘Yes, it is,’ Ziller agreed, looking out towards the distant Great River."
"Symbols are important, symbols do work. And when the symbol is a person then the symbol becomes... dirigible."
"To be their trophy instead of the Culture’s."
"You are disturbed by these things, aren’t you, Kabe?"
"I think maybe you and I need to study a bit less and talk a bit more."
"You’d think they’d have the decency to provide me with better inspiration."
"I’m really sorry, Major Quilan. I was never married myself, but I know what it is to love and to lose."
"We’ll make what amends and reparations we can."
"I always become a little disheartened when I’ve just finished something this size."
"I understand that being last to abandon it is considered sufficient."
"The smell was that of a sewer under an abattoir."
"974 Praf didn’t look too bad; she appeared perched, wings neatly folded, feet drawn up."
"Uagen swallowed. ‘Umm.’ He stared at the raptor scout."
"‘Your glyph tablet.’ ‘What?’ ‘The glyph tablet that belongs to you. If it might be used for the recording of the impressions you have, that would be of use to me.’"
"The sun-moons were worth lifetimes of study all on their own."
"Fear was there for a purpose. It was wired into any creature that had not completely turned its back on its evolutionary inheritance."
"The sleekly bulbous bodies of two ogrine disseisors swam through the air in tremendous sinuous flicks."
"‘An explosion is possible,’ 974 Praf said in a matter-of-fact manner. ‘This would be of a catastrophic nature.’"
"She was waiting. She had nothing better to do for the moment, and so she thought that she would take a good hard look and a good long sniff at the ground she stood on."
"No, of course not really. He’s here to deliver a summons for a minor traffic violation."
"Yes, but planets don’t need anybody to run them. They’re just sort of... there."
"No, but the point is, wherever you live you can accept that something has to be minding the infrastructure, but it shouldn’t run your life as well."
"I mean, you wouldn’t want a person in charge of stuff like that, would you? That’d be scary. That would be like the old days, like barbarism or something."
"I am well. And yourself? Beset by idiots. Good job I’m used to it."
"Hope I didn’t use too many technical terms... Oh, hello, Kabe. You still here? How are you, anyway?"
"I have exactly three tickets at my disposal; the allocation is so tight I’ll have to use one if I want one of my own avatars to attend."
"Consider me reassured. I no longer imagine that this piece of shit is here to assassinate me."
"If I suffered only one fool gladly, I assure you it would be you."
"That is the chaff, Ziller. I ignore that. I can respond politely and where necessary felicitously to the most intense bore forever without flagging and it costs me nothing."
"You have to get out. You are a citizen of the Culture."
"You are more female than male, you know that, don’t you?"
"There’s a viewing gallery. Good outlook on the whole surface, obviously, but no better than most people get when they arrive."
"The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they’d wanted was to absorb the view."
"We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too."
"The gone-before have read you, Quilan. They have looked inside your head and know what you are capable of better than you do yourself."
"It’s always one hundred per cent for the individual concerned."
"If I was one of those climbers I’d be pretty damned annoyed."
"No, no Still," the avatar said, shaking its head.
"The immediacy and vividness of the standard virtual adventure was sufficient to make all but the most determinedly corporeal of humans quite forget that the experience they were having wasn’t authentic."
"In the Culture, anybody anytime could experience anything anywhere for nothing, and never need worry themselves with the thought that actually it was all pretend."
"It was not the sort of thing you expected a machine, or even the human-form representative of a machine, to do at all."
"How wonderfully, bizarrely, romantically barbaric of them! Don’t you think?"
"The whole point of the Bowl was that it was open to the sky."
"The crisp blue day was a couple of hours old, the sun rising at their back."
"Technically, the Bowl was a giant specialised barge."
"They were distributed across the world so that there ought always to be one in the right place at the right time, no matter what the required conditions."
"They have waited patiently for years, hoping that one day you might feel inspired to complete another long work."
"The polite thing would be not to go, so that Ziller will."