Peter F. Hamilton · 1223 pages
Rating: (26.2K votes)
“You convinced yourselves we're just a bunch of regular lads who got a bad break in life. Anything else would have cracked your dream open and made you face reality. Illusion is easy. Illusion is the loser's way out. Your way. ”
“The balance is the penalty of being human: the danger of allowing yourself to feel. For this we walk a narrow path high above rocky ground. On one side we have the descent into animalism, on the other a godhead delusion. Both pulling at us, both tempting. But without these forces tugging at your psyche, stirring it into conflict, you can never love. They awaken us, you see, these warring sides, they arouse our passion.”
“Life alone is precious, but conscious thought is the greatest gift the universe offers.”
“He had used drugs and nanonic supplements to compensate at first, then supplements became replacements, with bones exchanged for carbon-fibre struts. Electrical consumption supplanted food intake. The final transition was his skin, replacing the eczema-ridden epidermis with a smooth ochre silicon membrane. Warlow didn’t need a spacesuit to work in the vacuum, he could survive for over three weeks without a power and oxygen recharge. His facial features had become purely cosmetic, a crude mannequin-like caricature of human physiognomy, although there was an inlet valve at the back of his throat for fluid intake. There was no hair, and he certainly didn’t bother with clothes. Sex was something he lost in his fifties.”
“weapons science was always kept very close to the government’s chest, receiving the most funds and the least publicity.”
“Kelly was starting to have serious second thoughts about the whole assignment. Like all war correspondents, she supposed. Being on the ground was very different to sitting in the office anticipating being on the ground. Especially with the appearance of that red cloud.”
“As if we didn't have enough weapons already. But that's human nature, we've always got to go one better, to increase the terror another notch.”
“Interpretation through the filters of ideology has always been one of our race's curses.”
“Resolution, the ability and determination to see things through to the end. However unexpected or disappointing that end turns out to be.”
“Funny how different life could be, so many things that make you take one route instead of another. If only we could live them all.”
“It is the others you must convince, the ignorant masses, yet paradoxically, they are the ones hardest for you to reach. Theirs are the minds which, thanks to circumstance, have set and hardened against new concepts and ideas from an early age.”
“The sun was boiling, the swaying was uncomfortable, the horse stank. She felt wonderful”
“Oh, I'll just improvise. I doubt you'll be much help. You couldn't have any real skills yet. Probably all you can do is stand there and shimmer, like some kind of freakin' Christmas ornament -- meaning only a believer or two will see you."
"Only a believer?"
"You mean you still haven't figured out that?" She shook her head in disbelief.
But he had figured it out; he just didn't want to admit it, just didn't want it to be true. The old lady had been a believer. So was Philip. Both of them had seen him shimmering. But Ivy had not. Ivy had stopped believing.”
“You assume that my previous sexual encounters were completely fulfilling, but you’re wrong. You gave me what I’ve never had—love and sex together. You’re the only one who has ever been my lover in the true sense.”
“I thought that what I felt for you was right," Luce said. "I loved you until it hurt me, until our love was consumed by your pride and rage. The thing you called love made me disappear. So I had to stop loving." She Paused. "Our adoration never diminished the Throne, but your love diminished me. I never meant to hurt you. I only meant to stop you from hurting me.”
“That's a misconception, Lennie. The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.”
“He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then.”
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