Ian McDonald Quotes & Sayings

. . . they beheld its atlas-familiar snowy poles, its blue land-locked seas, its green forests and yellow plains and wide red deserts. They looked down upon Mount Olympus, so tall her summit rose about the highest snow, and the bustling lands of the Grand Valley, thick with cities and towns. As their earth loomed closer, they saw the glittering moonring and here the oracle-eye rested, filling the room with incomprehensible drifting shapes. Some were so huge they took minutes to cross the room, some were tiny and tumbling, some were busy as insects, flitting through the spectators intent upon their small errands; all of them bore the name ROTECH somewhere upon them. — Ian McDonald

In the Age of Kali the meek and helpless will be preyed upon without mercy, and there will be a surplus of AK-47s. — Ian McDonald

It's the superhero problem ... Superpowers make everything personal. Batman versus Joker. Fantastic Four versus Galactus. The Big G might be the Devourer of Worlds, but in the end he's just a dude. Beat him and the problem goes away. But the real problems aren't like that. You can't solve them by hitting them. The real supervillains ... were people in suits who met in rooms and decided things. Destroy one and another would take her place — Ian McDonald

The geek of the Earth are a tribe and they are mighty. — Ian McDonald

The implants just give you a new set of reproductive-free imperatives, that's all. The rest, thank the gods, is up to you. They wouldn't be worth anything if they didn't give rise to the most troubling and complex problems of the heart. They are what makes all this glory, this madness worthwhile. We are born to the trouble as sparks fly upwards, that is what is great about us, man, woman, transgen, nute. — Ian McDonald

Loss bites and pulls. It is a thing of hooks sunk into every part of you, parts that you would not think could feel loss like thumbs and lips, hooks moored to wind and memory so that slightest disturbance, the slightest act of recall, tugs at those fine lines. Red is the colour of loss and its smell is like burned roses. — Ian McDonald

Thomas Lull knows he is un-American: he hates cars but loves trains, Indian trains, big trains like a nation on the move. He is content with the contradiction that they are at once hierarchical and democratic, a temporary community brought together for a time; vital while it lasts, burning away like early mist when the terminus is reached. — Ian McDonald

It is a fake, but a good fake. Turkey is the land of the masterful fake. But it is far far from that hateful little eighth-floor apartment huddling between the roar of the expressway and the blare of the mosque. — Ian McDonald

The prices are vertiginous. Carlinhos and Wagner take a booth and they talk and dip their wafers of exquisite beef into the sauces but most of the time they keep companionable silence together, as close men do, and find they have communicated everything. Run — Ian McDonald

He never looked great but he's dreadful now, face thin and eyes staring like you see in cartoons of mad imams and hunched over. If that's what God does to you you should pick your friends more carefully. — Ian McDonald

It's so much better to have sex with someone who's always available, knows what you want and who loves you more deeply than anyone else ever can. Yourself. — Ian McDonald

...they were triplets and as mutually indistinguishable as peas in a pod or days in a prison. — Ian McDonald

Like these entities may be the lost acres of the mind, things that have been overlooked by the higher consciousness; that it can't see them, can't process them, fills in the space where they are by folding up the visual map around them., putting things on either side next to each other, like the blind spot in the eye. — Ian McDonald

The might and magic of money is not what it allows you to own; it is what it allows you to be. Money is freedom. — Ian McDonald

It is always dangerous when your enemy has a sense of humor. Ask Batman. — Ian McDonald

Time spent in the company of remarkable men is time well spent. — Ian McDonald

Is this a Kurdish thing?'
'What?'
'Being deliberately contradictory? — Ian McDonald

We always thought the robot apocalypse would be fleets of killer drones and war mecha the size of apartment blocks and terminators with red eyes. Not a row of mechanised checkouts — Ian McDonald

Humans are not made for endless light. Humans need their darknesses. — Ian McDonald

There's never been a rule of human behavior that hasn't been broken by someone, somewhere, sometime, in some circumstance mundane or spectacular. To be human is to transcend the rules. — Ian McDonald

He's never fought with religion; what is the point of railing against such beauty, such intimate theatre, such chime of eternity? He can treasure it without believing in it. — Ian McDonald

The sense of power, of human ability, was so strong. Many of the men cried. Men are so easily moved. — Ian McDonald

Grandfather was a tree — Ian McDonald

It's another post-EU incongruity. Spas are sissy, indulgent, European. Hamams are authentic and Turkish. — Ian McDonald

You're so terrestrial, — Ian McDonald

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. — Ian McDonald

Where there are drones, there will always be police. Where there are police, there will always be violence. — Ian McDonald

Handsome boys fighting in not many clothes. Even better than handsome boys marrying. — Ian McDonald

Have you ever looked at a map of our country, Necdet?' Green Headscarf says. 'It's a map of the human mind. We're split by water over two continents, Europe and Anatolia. We are seven per cent Europe, ninety-three per cent Asia. Conscious Thrace, unconscious, pre-conscious, sub-concious Anatolia. And Istanbul - have you ever seen a neuron, Necdet? A brain cell? The marvel is that the synapses don't touch. There is always a gap - there must a gap, otherwise consciousness would not exist. The Bosphorus is that synaptic cleft. Potential can flow across the cleft. It's the cleft that makes consciousness possible. — Ian McDonald

A joyful task,' he says and she realizes that he welcomes the idea of years of searching, tile by tile, inscription by inscription, cornice by cornice and niche by niche, that the painstaking search of Sinan's greatest achievement, decades long, is the holy task; that the secret letter is cut in every stone and tile. By the time you find it, you have realized the supreme unimportance of finding it. A Sufi lesson. — Ian McDonald

Family is what works. — Ian McDonald

Legends should stay legends otherwise they just become history, when the natural course of things is the other way around, from history to legend. — Ian McDonald

Najia can feel yts subdermal activators against her forearm. Not man not woman not both not neither. Nute. Another way of being human, speaking a phsyical language she does not understand. More alien to her than any man, any father, yet this body next to hers is loyal, tough, funny courageous, clever, kind, sensual, vulnerable. Sweet. Sexy. All you could wish in a friend of the soul. Or a lover. — Ian McDonald

Mr. Durukan, if God is dead then everything is conspiracy. — Ian McDonald

We were young and thought we were invincible and we threw ourselves into the gears of history and it ground us up. — Ian McDonald

I'm not even the one per cent; I'm the one per cent of the one per cent; — Ian McDonald

Fake it may be, lies and deceptions, but this is the world in which we find ourselves, and here we must make our little lives. — Ian McDonald

Coffee is a drink for grownups. No kid ever likes coffee. It's psychoactive. Coffee is the drug of memory. — Ian McDonald

Escape, son, may not be the way," says Mr. Spider. "It would be reassuring if everything was finally reducible to Light versus Darkness, Order versus Chaos, Good versus Evil. However, life is not pulp fantasy. If the Way were easy, what virtue would there be in following it? The teaching of the Daishi is that the Way does not lie in escape, or even in defeating. — Ian McDonald

If God truly were inside you, could you bear to look at it? Necdet says. — Ian McDonald

And how did you find the East?'
'It's a shit-hole. But it's our shit-hole. — Ian McDonald

The present is an illusion. — Ian McDonald

Nothing tells you that you are not on Earth anymore than exhaling at one price and inhaling at another. — Ian McDonald

Bullets are incompatible with pressurised environments and complex machinery. — Ian McDonald

Well, the human genome has massive redundancy - that means that two per cent of the DNA does all the work of instructing the ribosomes that build the proteins that make up the cells of your body. Ninety-eight per cent of your DNA just sits there doing nothing. Taking up space in the gene. — Ian McDonald

Any AI smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it. — Ian McDonald

The time is short and the hills is dark and I's got miles to go before I sleeps. Is is no easy road. — Ian McDonald

The dildo is long and elegant, a classic old school moon-rocket, complete with four stabilising fins at the bottom. Each fin controls a different haptic field. A silver pussy-rocket printed to the dimensions of her vagina and vulva. Not a penis. Never a penis. Ariel Corta has never allowed a penis inside her. — Ian McDonald

The men had to use condoms. You didn't want to get hit by that stuff, flying. I said be kind and I did something worse than flying cum. I threw up all over him. I couldn't stop throwing up. That's not sexy. — Ian McDonald

I realised that the moon was not a safe place. It knew a thousand ways to kill you if you were stupid, if you were careless, if you were lazy, but the real danger was the people around you. The moon was not a world, it was a submarine. Outside was death. I would be sealed in with these people. There was no law, no justice: there was only management. The moon was the frontier, but it was the frontier to nothing. There was nowhere to run. — Ian McDonald

Sensitive dependence on initial conditions; one word, one act, can change the world. Well they named it chaos theory. — Ian McDonald

He is a gross man-mountain balanced on strangely tiny feet. Not fat, vast. — Ian McDonald

Her face had always held too much personality to be merely beautiful. — Ian McDonald

The exoneration of the mass. No one voice is to blame. But his voice was there. — Ian McDonald

You collect art: you must know that the miniature artists, at the end of careers spent painting the tiniest, most exacting details that no one would ever look at, would often put their eyes out with needles. Too much beauty, yes, but also too much seeing. They were tired of seeing. The dark was safe and warm and comfortable. Blindness was a gift. I still have seeing to do. — Ian McDonald

This was defeat. This was failure; a quiet, ashen world. True humility and obedience, where the knee is bowed to the inevitable, the ring is kissed without pride or restraint. — Ian McDonald