Gavin Leech

"This is an eta village? Jesus Christ, these people're eta?"
"What's wrong with eters?" van Nekk asked. "Of course they're eters... Eters are the best heathen we've seen here. More like us than the other bastards."

"It's time to open up the country, Mariko-san... If I were President of the Regents again, I'd make treaties with any nation...

"On the first day of the New Year you will become a Christian."
"Me!"
"Yes. Of your own free will. Tell Tsukku-san privately."
"Sire?"
Toranaga wheeled on him. "Are you deaf?..."
"Please excuse me. Yes, Father, I understand."

I've been thinking that maybe I lucked out with him - there's potential for abuse in this 'atomic relationship' thing...

Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is prone to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms.

Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.

At moments like this I hate being an unreconstructed human - an island of thinking jelly trapped in a bony carapace, endless milliseconds away from its lovers, forced to squeeze every meaning through a low-bandwidth speech channel. All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

"This is an eta village? Jesus Christ, these people're eta?"
"What's wrong with eters?" van Nekk asked. "Of course they're eters... Eters are the best heathen we've seen here. More like us than the other bastards."

"It's time to open up the country, Mariko-san... If I were President of the Regents again, I'd make treaties with any nation...

"On the first day of the New Year you will become a Christian."
"Me!"
"Yes. Of your own free will. Tell Tsukku-san privately."
"Sire?"
Toranaga wheeled on him. "Are you deaf?..."
"Please excuse me. Yes, Father, I understand."

'You want to die because your mate is dead and you are pining

'You want to die because your mate is dead and you are pining for her, is that not the truth?'
'I would put it a little stronger than pining. But it was her death that took the meaning out of my life.'
'The lives of your family and your society in this time of need and restructuring; these mean nothing to you?'
'Not nothing, Estodien. But not enough, either. I wish that I could feel otherwise, but I cannot. It is as though all the people I care about but feel I ought to care about more are already in another world from the one I inhabit.'
'She was just... a person, just one individual. What makes her so special that her memory... outranks the more pressing needs of those still alive for whom something can still be done?'
'Nothing, Estodien. It is-'
'Nothing indeed. It is not her memory; it is yours. It is not her specialness or uniqueness that you celebrate, Quilan, but your own. You are a romantic, Quilan. You find the idea of tragic death romantic, you find the idea of joining her - even if it is joining her in oblivion - romantic.' The old male drew himself up as though getting ready to go. 'I hate romantics, Quilan. They do not really know themselves, but what is worse they do not really want to know themselves - or, ultimately, anybody else - because they think that will take the mystery out of life. They are fools. You are a fool.'

'Of course I don't have to do this,' one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. "But look; this table's clean.'
He agreed that the table was clean.
"Usually,' the man said. "I work on alien -- no offence -- alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that's my specialty ... like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But ... the job's never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled ... but,' he slapped the table, "when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you've done something. It's an achievement."
"But in the end, it's still cleaning a table."
"And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?' the man suggested.
He smiled in response to the man's grin, "Well, yes.'
'But then what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either?' I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway" - the man laughed - "people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And," the man said with a smile, "it's a good way of meeting people."

“Aw, come on; argue, dammit.”
“I don’t believe in argument,” he said, looking out.
“You don’t?” Erens said, genuinely surprised. “Shit, and I thought I was the cynical one.”
“It’s not cynicism,” he said flatly. “I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.”
“Oh well, thank you.”
“It’s comforting, I suppose.” He watched the stars wheel, like absurdly slow shells seen at night: rising, peaking, falling... (And reminded himself that the stars too would explode, perhaps, one day.) “Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,” he said. “And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.”
“Excuses, eh?"
"Yes, excuses," he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. "I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He looked at Erens. "You've attacked the wrong thing.”