It was astonishing how quickly friendship could turn to enmity, she thought, like a compass needle swinging from one pole to the other. They’d been e… - Alastair Reynolds

All right, Marius—I get the message. In fact I intercepted it, parsed it, filtered it, decrypted it with the appropriate onetime pad and wrote a fucking two-hundred-page report on it. Satisfied?" "I'm never satisfied, Mishenka. It just isn't in my nature.

A splendidly inept thing," Sylveste said, nodding despite himself. "What?" "The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off—it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people.

I had you down as a xenophobic zealot," Quillen said. "I didn't realize you were also a sadist." "We all have our hidden depths.