Top 100 Richard K Morgan Quotes
#1. He storms down in savage joy, to meet all the waiting blades and hate.
Richard K. Morgan
#2. I walked beside the woman I had killed last week and tried to hold up my end of a conversation about cats. There
Richard K. Morgan
#3. The echo of the first shot, like the first sip of whiskey, burning ...
Richard K. Morgan
#5. If I know anything about stack engineers, they'll weld down the lid on your remote stack faster than politicians leaving a war zone.
Richard K. Morgan
#6. Reality is so flexible these days, it's hard to tell who's disconnected from it and who isn't. You might even say it's a pointless distinction.
Richard K. Morgan
#8. Knowledge tossed away," she said, shivering a little in the desert chill. "Willful ignorance in the face of something we might have to work to understand." At
Richard K. Morgan
#10. I came quite late to gaming: I didn't start playing until 2002.
Richard K. Morgan
#11. I lay still for a while, picking up the scattered garments of my mind and trying to assemble some kind of reasonable outfit from them.
Richard K. Morgan
#12. Rich people do this. They have the power and they see no reason not to use it. Men and women are just merchandise, like everything else. Store them, freight them, decant them. Sign at the bottom, please. On
Richard K. Morgan
#13. The tongues of men are not much leashed by concerns for accuracy or truth.
Richard K. Morgan
#14. I'd always had a hankering to write some old-school sword and sorcery. And there certainly are advantages to that particular form - for one thing, you're able to go all-out on the imaginative front, with a lot less concern for the usual unities of time and space and character.
Richard K. Morgan
#16. Most people don't like to think things through. Too much effort. They'd rather have the edited visceral highlights.
Richard K. Morgan
#17. These are pious, clean-living men, worshipping at the temple of their own bodies."
"Hmm. Sounds distinctly erotic.
Richard K. Morgan
#18. She wanted to do damage, gashed red, bleeding, and screaming damage to all and any of the bland facets of social restraint that meshed her about like spiderweb.
Richard K. Morgan
#19. Too much virtuality will do that to you sometimes. There's this vague feeling of abrasion in the head when you disconnect, a disquieting sense that reality isn't quite sharp enough anymore, a waxing and waning fuzziness that might be what the edge of madness feels like.
Richard K. Morgan
#20. The only problem they had ... was in drawing the fine differences between war-mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own; justifiable loss-mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains; and criminal negligence-mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit.
Richard K. Morgan
#22. He'd already made her for Kiriath and was backing off like a poet asked to wash dishes. Ringil
Richard K. Morgan
#23. Certainly a decade and a half out in the real world, bashing my head against things, probably made me into a more textured writer. It gives you something to write about.
Richard K. Morgan
#24. We live in bloodbath times ... and looks like tonight is bath night.
Richard K. Morgan
#25. In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, Virginia Vidaura said, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough.
Richard K. Morgan
#26. The overwhelming impression I got was that if there was a line of least resistance in life, this face had never been along it.
Richard K. Morgan
#27. You should have heard the boatman who brought me up here from the Glades. Fire in the northern sky, lights in the marshes, a black dog heard barking through the night. Doesn't occur to anyone to wonder how exactly you can tell it's a black dog just from the fucking bark it makes.
Richard K. Morgan
#28. It was like resolution. The circling antagonisms collapsed inward like orbitals crashing and burning, surrendering to a mutual gravity that had dragged like chains while it endured but in release was a streak of fire through the nerves.
Richard K. Morgan
#29. There's a lot of young authors out there, and people do seem to forget: in order to write well, you do need to have some experience.
Richard K. Morgan
#30. Culture is like a smog. To live
within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be
contaminated.
Richard K. Morgan
#31. Or maybe that was just the swiftly gathering sense of motion that had me now, the drug-like grip of a decision taken and what it meant.
Richard K. Morgan
#32. We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn't hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be?
Richard K. Morgan
#33. Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done. Virginia
Richard K. Morgan
#34. The Lady Ishil gestured. "Oh, we asked. It wasn't difficult. Everyone in this pigsty of a town seems to know where you sleep." A delicately curled lip. She let him go. "And with who."
Ringil ignored that one. "I'm a hero, Mother. What do you expect?
Richard K. Morgan
#36. It was the single forgiving phrase in the syntax of weaponry I had strapped about me. The rest were unequivocal sentences of death.
Richard K. Morgan
#37. Pretty much anything you care to imagine can happen in a fantasy, which in turn means you can really crank up the intensity of the tale you're telling.
Richard K. Morgan
#38. Pull on the new flesh like borrowed gloves
and burn your fingers once again.
Richard K. Morgan
#39. There's a sameness to streetlife. On every world I've ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above.
Richard K. Morgan
#40. I guess if I was made responsible for every single line of dialogue in a game and every single piece of textual visual detail, every sign or piece of graffiti, then yes, I think that would be comparable to the time and effort required to write a very long novel, indeed.
Richard K. Morgan
#41. It has been a messy week, and I blame myself as much as anyone else. I feel like a behaviourist who has designed her rat's maze poorly.
Richard K. Morgan
#42. I think certainly if I'd started getting published when I was in my early twenties, I was quite sheltered then and didn't know anything much about the world. I hadn't had any direct experience of how the world works.
Richard K. Morgan
#43. Forget uniforms or nominal allegiances - if it wears a weapon and scars, it's no safer than the next starving wild dog. Feed and water with care, walk like you're carrying dragon eggs, and never, never get between rival packs.
Richard K. Morgan
#45. War is like any other bad relationship. Of course you want out, but at what price? And perhaps more importantly, once you get out, will you be any better off?
- Quellcrist Falconer
Richard K. Morgan
#46. I said - do you want to kill a fucking dragon?" More yells, and more punch behind them this time. Egar eased up out of his crouch and filled his lungs. "I can't hear you! Do you - or do you not - want to kill - a motherfucking dragon?
Richard K. Morgan
#47. I remember visits to the local libraries and getting my own library cards as things of rite-of-passage significance.
Richard K. Morgan
#48. About the blood; it isn't yours. You put this flesh on a couple of days ago, and you'll be taking it off again soon if you can manage not to get killed first. Don't worry about wounds; check your functionality.
Richard K. Morgan
#49. You'll always have morons like that, swallowing belief patterns whole so they don't have to think for themselves.
Richard K. Morgan
#50. You know nothing of me." Through clenched teeth. "Nothing. You've fucked me, that's all. Well, that's a crowded hole you're in, darling. And us humans, we're a lying, dissembling bunch, remember. Doesn't pay to trust us between the sheets any more than anywhere else.
Richard K. Morgan
#51. What others believe is not my concern, unless they attempt to force it on me.
Richard K. Morgan
#52. There were always the stories, of course, the war legends, but who - other than himself, in Jhesh's tavern, increasingly wearily - still told those?
Richard K. Morgan
#53. His lack of condemnatory zeal gave him a reputation in the religious hierarchy that ensured he would always remain a humble teacher in a backwater town.
Richard K. Morgan
#54. The laugh tagged on the end of it is forced as well. I smile fractionally. Edged with old pain, but there's a strange comfort to the way it hurts.
Richard K. Morgan
#55. Science casts a long black shadow back over who we think we are, and where it falls the temperature falls with it. Its touch is chilly and unforgiving.
Richard K. Morgan
#56. When a forty-minute swim in the Hendrix's underground pool failed to dispel either the longing for Miriam Bancroft's torrid company or the Merge Nine hangover, I did the only thing I felt equipped for. I ordered painkillers from room service, and went shopping.
Richard K. Morgan
#57. The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.
Richard K. Morgan
#58. Ultimate insult that it's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life, and that it's nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal. QUELLCRIST FALCONER Things I Should Have Learned by Now Volume II There
Richard K. Morgan
#59. A typical twenty-page short story would work quite well as a graphic novel. A single graphic novel of maybe 120 pages would condense down into a short story quite nicely.
Richard K. Morgan
#60. Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal.
Richard K. Morgan
#61. No way. You won't catch Notley working weekends. Calls it the American disease, working all the hours God sends you.
Richard K. Morgan
#62. There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.
Richard K. Morgan
#63. Every skill must be practised. Every act rehearsed. A blade is only a blade when it cuts.
Richard K. Morgan
#64. It's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life and that it's nothing personal.
Well, fuck them.
Make it personal.
Richard K. Morgan
#65. Religion's just politics with higher stakes, Tak. You know that, you saw it in action on Sharya. No reason these people can't do the same when it comes to the crunch. These people are sheep. They'll do whatever their holy men tell them.
Richard K. Morgan
#66. You can't talk to people like that. Soldiers, corporate execs, politicians. All you can do is kill them, and even that rarely makes things any better. They just leave their shit behind, and someone else to carry on.
Richard K. Morgan
#67. So where the fuck are you, Isaac? I can hear your breathing, I just need to see you so I can stop it.
Richard K. Morgan
#68. Two of them drifted over to intercept me with the easy calm of big cats that have been fed recently.
Richard K. Morgan
#69. According to the psychosurgeons, we act more in keeping with our true selves in a dream than in any other situation, including the throes of orgasm and the moment of our deaths. Maybe that explains why so much of what we do in the real world makes so little sense.
Richard K. Morgan
#70. When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options. You can smell his breath, take his pulse and check his pupils to see if he's ingested anything nasty, or you can believe him.
Richard K. Morgan
#71. Yes, and had your hotel proved slightly less psychotic, matters would never have got as far out of hand as they have.
Richard K. Morgan
#72. I have so little patience with the whole Y.A. book thing. As far as I'm concerned, you either read books for children or you read books for adults.
Richard K. Morgan
#73. There are no alternatives. You live with what is. And you don't let your ghosts rent room in your head.
Richard K. Morgan
#74. Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying.
Richard K. Morgan
#77. Everyone's afraid of what they don't understand, Ringil said quietly.
Richard K. Morgan
#78. And though, finally, they would bring him down with sheer weight of numbers, none who heard him ask that question lived to see the dawn.
Richard K. Morgan
#80. Men were like blades, they would all break sooner or later, you included. But you looked around at the men you led, and in their eyes you saw what kind of steel you had to hand, how it had been forged and tempered, what blows, if any, it would take.
Richard K. Morgan
#81. Was a time ...
Sure. And there was another fucking time the summers never seemed to end and you'd never paid for it in your life. Remember that? Time passes, Max - get over it. Skip the fucking nostalgia, let's get where we're at.
Richard K. Morgan
#82. Hand over your responses to the man who triggers them, and you have already lost the battle for self. Look beyond, and find yourself there instead.
Richard K. Morgan
#83. The priest I didn't talk to at all, because I didn't want to have to hide his body afterward.
Richard K. Morgan
#84. Potential, and the will to deploy it. That's all magic is in the end, you know.
Richard K. Morgan
#85. Rumor ran in the slum streets of Trelayne like sewage in the gutters, mingled and colorful in its contents, but mostly shit.
Richard K. Morgan
#86. The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine. Reality doesn't offer this assurance, so it's very easy to develop the mistaken impression that you're in control.
Richard K. Morgan
#88. Religion is funny stuff, and it has unpredictable effects on those who use it.
Richard K. Morgan
#89. From a legal point of view - " He shook his head. "Forget the law. It isn't going to help. They'll cite it where it suits them, ignore it where it doesn't. They're clerics, Archeth. They spend their whole fucking lives selectively interpreting textual authority to advantage.
Richard K. Morgan
#90. That's right, Dragonbane. And brothers always stood together, the buffalo came when they were called, the grass grew taller and greener, and it never fucking rained. Get a grip, old man.
Richard K. Morgan
#91. They're brutal, moronic, they have the ethical consciousness of apes and the initiative levels of sheep. But you took the field against the reptiles for them nonetheless. Why?" Ringil
Richard K. Morgan
#92. They named me Kristin after some whale scientist in Australia, worked on the original translation team.
Richard K. Morgan
#93. I'm Kristin Ortega, Organic Damage Division. Bancroft was my case.
Richard K. Morgan
#94. It's amazing how constant repetition can make even the most obvious truths irritating enough to disagree with.
Richard K. Morgan
#95. No such thing as time travel, he'd rumbled patiently, once. Only live with what you've done, and try in the future to do what you're happy to live with.
Richard K. Morgan
#96. I think by definition you need to have lived a little bit to write anything that's humanly true.
Richard K. Morgan
#97. There's a general hate in the hearts of men. You went to war, Gil, you should know that better than anyone. It's like the heat of the sun. Men like Kaad are just the focal figures, like lenses to gather the sun's rays on kindling. You can smash a lens, but that won't put out the sun.
Richard K. Morgan
#98. The myth of Good Guys and Bad Guys is one of the most pervasive we own, and morally grey anti-heroes are simply one of modern fiction's attempts to shake off that mythology and replace it with something a bit more honest.
Richard K. Morgan
#99. You thought perhaps you would drink it away, the plague? Was that the plan?"
"I thought perhaps I'd try to die drunk."
"Such ambition. And this from a dragon-slayer.
Richard K. Morgan
#100. A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.
Richard K. Morgan
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