Ryan Wilson

“It’d been my stepfather’s voice too and the voice of so many men I’d met before, all of them charming until privilege crashed into reality, then out came this aggression, this meanness.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore

“He learned more about the Empire itself, its history and politics, philosophy and religion, its beliefs and mores, and its mixtures of subspecies and sexes. It seemed to him to be an unbearably vivid tangle of contradictions; at the same time pathologically violent and lugubriously sentimental, startlingly barbaric and surprisingly sophisticated, fabulously rich and grindingly poor (but also, undeniably, unequivocally fascinating).”
― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

“compliance is the price of liberty.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket

“empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting—corruption and favoritism, mostly—endemic to the system.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games