The same beautiful bullshit that everyone told themselves. That they were special. That they mattered. That some vast intelligence behind the curtains of reality cared what happened to them. And in al...
The ones that don’t kill you don’t count.
The lights shifted into and out of his field of view. He wondered if that was what it would be like to look at stars. He’d never looked up at a sky. The thought inspired a certain vertigo. A sense of...
The immediate danger wasn’t the Ring. At least not right now. It was humans taking their anxiety out on the nearest enemy they could actually see: each other.
The birds, on the other hand, were going crazy. They filled the air with chirps and trills and songs. It was probably sparrow for Holy shit, what’s going on, we’re all gonna die, but it sounded pretty...
The Mormons had been planning to run the human race’s first extrasolar colony from a place that would have been equally at home as an accounting office. It felt anticlimactic. Hello, welcome to your c...
The Epstein Drive hadn’t given humanity the stars, but it had delivered the planets.
The , registered to Captain Eric Khan out of Pallas, was still just goods and people heading into the frontier to stake a claim. Fewer horses, maybe, but more fusion reactors.
That’s the thing about autocracy. It looks pretty decent while it still looks pretty decent. Survivable, anyway. And it keeps looking like that right up until it doesn’t. That’s how you find out it’s...
That seemed to be the human pattern—reach out to the unknown and then make it into the sort of thing you left in the first place.
That humans only have so much emotional energy. No matter how intense the situation, or how powerful the feelings, it was impossible to maintain a heightened emotional state forever. Eventually you’d...
Some things were secret even after you told them.
Situations change and clinging too tightly to what came before kills you.
Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it. A
She’d stopped looking tired a while ago and had moved on to whatever tired turns into when it became a lifestyle.
She had seen Holden on the newsfeeds and reports. At the beginning of the war between Mars and the Belt, he had been the most important man in the solar system, and the celebrity, while it had waxed a...
Reputation never has very much to do with reality, she said. I could name half a dozen paragons of virtue that are horrible, small-souled, evil people.
Point of clarification, Alex said, raising his hand. We have an apocalypse comin’? Was that a thing we knew about? Venus, Avasarala said. Oh. That apocalypse, Alex said, lowering his hand. Right.
People. No matter where he went, no matter what he did, it was all still people. Kelsey
Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.