Ian McDonald

"“Hey!” the people cried in their dreams. “Give us back our ghosts!” for ghosts are as much a part of a community as its plumbing or its library, for how can a community be without its memories?"

"At some point it will inevitably crash again: as weapons of mass destruction go, unrestricted market economies are among the more subtle but sure."

"Nationalism, then Islamism, both twentieth-century inventions, destroyed the Greek civilization in Egypt that had endured for three thousand years."

"He had sworn on his fathers honour, his mothers life, his brothers masculinity, his sisters purity and his prophets beard that he would never set foot there again. God, knowing people, thinks little of honour or purity or even life, but vows made on his prophet he loves to confound."

"That old saw about a problem shared being a problem halved? Damnable lie. A problem shared is a problem doubled."

"It is an easy, and terrible, mistake to make, to think your will is God’s will."

"Only miscalculation could kill you in interstellar war. The equations were hard but they were fair."

"She knew what she was now. She had a purpose. Freedom was still hers, but it was a purposeful freedom. She would seek responsibility, for freedom without responsibility was worthless, and to that duality she would add power, for responsibility without power was impotence. She would go to Wisdom and enthrone the trinity of liberties within herself."

"She had trapped the bird of salvation, sung to it, tamed it and wrung its neck."

"It was fate, and being angry at fate was as futile as being angry at the weather."

"Once muddying subjectivities are removed from the issue, the decision becomes clear."

"The freefall sex? Grossly oversold. Everything moves in all the wrong ways. Things get away from you. You have to strap everything down to get purchase. It’s more like mutual bondage."