M. John Harrison - Light (2002)

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She had impressed him as capable of behaviour even more meaningless than most human beings. He had watched her kill her own people with a ferocity that betrayed real grief. But she was someone, he had decided early, who struggled harder with life than she needed to: this he respected, even admired.

M. John Harrison
People think it's a failure to live alone. But it isn't. The failure is to live with someone because you can't face anything else.

M. John Harrison
Everywhere you look it unpacks to infinity. What you look for, you find. And you people can have it. All of it.
The comfortable generosity of this offer puzzled Kearney, so he decided to ignore it. It seemed meaningless anyway.

M. John Harrison
Generally, it was impossible to understand the motives of aliens.

M. John Harrison
Anna accumulated things as a way of insulating herself against her own thoughts.

M. John Harrison
Then he heard a voice say: It was amazing to them to discover they had always been in the garden without understanding it, and knew for certain that the inside and the outside of everything are always a single, continuous medium. In that moment he believed he could go anywhere. With a shout of elation he attempted to fall forward in all possible directions at once; only to find to his dismay that in the very exercise of this privilege he had selected one of them.

M. John Harrison
They were arrant newcomers, driven by the nouveau enthusiasms of a cowboy economy. They had no idea what they had come for, or how to get it: they only knew they would. They had no idea how to comport themselves. They sensed there was money to be made. They dived right in. They started wars. They stunned into passivity five of the alien races they found in possession of the galaxy and fought the sixth—which they called the Nastic out of a mistranslation of the Nastic's word for space —to a wary truce. After that they fought one another.

M. John Harrison