Use of Weapons (Culture, #3)

by Iain M. Banks

The way to a man’s heart is through his chest!”)

How long should she spin this out? He was what she wanted, but it would mean so much more after a charged friendship; that long, exquisite exchange of gradually more intimate confidences, the slow accumulation of shared experiences, the languorous spiraling dance of attraction, coming and going and coming and going, winding closer and closer, until that laziness was sublimed in the engulfing heat of consummation.

accidentally my love story

Love, she maintained, was a process, not a state. Held still, it withered.

“May your children suffer and die horribly!” the woman shrieked. “Well, if that’s really the way you feel,” he sighed, lying back again, “then there’s nothing worse I can wish on you than to be exactly the fuckhead you so obviously are.”

Their machines could do everything else much better than they could; no sense in breeding superhumans for strength or intelligence, when their drones and Minds were so much more matter-and energy-efficient at both. But pleasure . . . well, that was a different matter. What else was the human form good for?

‘Za-kalwe, in all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.’

The bomb lives only as it is falling.