Use of Weapons (Culture, #3)

by Iain M. Banks

“You almost manage to make that sound like a criticism,”

rules were forged as you went along and were never the same twice anyway, where just by the nature of things nothing could be known or predicted or even judged with any real certainty.

but in the end it came down to people and problems.

the cream or scum (depending on how you looked at it), to live or die, depending on how well I advise, and on how capable these clowns are of taking that advice.

wrapped in a skein of wealth and advantage designed to maintain the dark dominion of the knowing over the ignorant

a great metal warship, becalmed in stone but still dreadful and awful and potent, and about the two sisters who were the balance of that warship’s fate, and about their own fates, and about the Chair, and the Chairmaker.

“It’s important.” “Isn’t everything?” “And we can pay you properly this time.”

(This was more like it, some small, remindful voice inside him said. This is more like the way it’s suppose to be; with this, you can leave all that other stuff behind, the guilt and the secrecy and the lies; the ship and the chair and the other man . . . But he tried not listen to that voice.)

nothing lasts forever,

“Thank you for your contribution,” she said icily. “I was bringing things to a conclusion quite smoothly there until you stepped in.” “I’m very sorry,” he said, not at all.

you could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process, not a state. Held still, it withered.

Wide asleep as usual.”

He sometimes had to be reminded, he realized, that he still possessed the capacity to despise.

It had always seemed to him that the ideal man was either a soldier or a poet, and so, having spent most of his years being one of those — to him — polar opposites, he determined to attempt to turn his life around and become the other.

“Everybody seems to think I should; they believe you’re fighting the good fight. It’s just that . . . I get suspicious when everybody agrees about something.”

. I’d like to believe, to finally know, to finally be able to prove that I was . . .” He shrugged, grinned. “. . . doing good.”

“I thought the rules were meant to be the same for everybody.” “They are. But in Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws — the rules of right and

wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe — break down; beyond those metaphysical event horizons, there exist . . . special circumstances.”

Congenital Optimist

why are beautiful women so cynical these days?”

deliberate caricature of the conventional folly of war.

the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right;