Some quotes from what I think is my favourite book:
Our family’s symbol was a black cinquefoil; his was a pair of intermeshing cogs, the emblem painted on the ship’s sleek, flanged hull.
‘A wind-up toy that walks and talks.’ The avatar’s harlequin face creased into an expression of abject disgust. ‘Haunted clockwork!’
You are a bookworm who has tunnelled through the pages of history. Is that not so?’
If my years as a shatterling had taught me anything, it was that not all questions had answers. Societies had reduced themselves to radioactive dust because they could not accept that single unpalatable truth.
That it was a Homunculus weapon was beyond argument: I was seeing it from a foreshortened perspective, but Dalliance was able to extrapolate its true form, and the delicate, slender-stalked flower-like shape, its maw a coronet of diaphanous petals, veined like dragonfly wings, was an uncanny match against data in the trove.
Their surgeons had patched him back together and given him the eye – the height of their cyberscience. It was a thing of laughable crudity by Line standards, like a peg-leg or a wooden hand fixed in one position.
Everything came and went, everything was new and bright with promise once and old and worn out later, and everything left a small, diminishing stain on eternity, a mark that time would eventually erase.
He vowed to remake himself from the bottom up, reorganising his basic architecture from the very foundations of his mind.
He just became something weirder, larger, faster than he had been before. The old mansion was now a shining, rationally organised edifice.