Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror." I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.

Eva. Every day I've climbed up the belfry chanting a lucky chant at one syllable per beat, "To-day-to-day-let-her-be-here-to-day-to-day.

Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretatio n for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable.

What is "poker"? A card game where abler liars take money off less able liars.

This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

If, by happiness, you mean the absence of adversity I and all fabricants are the happiest stratum in corpocracy as genomicists insist. However, if happiness means the conquest of adversity or a sense of purpose, or the xercise of one’s will to power, then of all Nea So Copros’s slaves we surely are the most miserable.

Oh, diplomacy ... it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.