James S.A. Corey

“In the artifacts that are conscious, memories of vanished lives still flicker. Tissues that were changed without dying hold the moment that a boy heard his sister was leaving home. They hold multiplication tables. They hold images of sexuality and violence and beauty. They hold the memories of flesh that no longer exists. They hold metaphors: mitochondria, starfish, Hitler’s-brain-in-a-jar, hell realm. They dream. Structures that were neurons twitch and loop and burn and dream. Images and words and pain and fear, endless.”

“Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito. So here the monkeys were, poking the shiny box and making guesses about what it did.”

“No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work.”

“The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light as assaulting and dangerous.”

“Later," Amos said, "when you're wishing we had this stuff, I am going to merciless in my mockery. And then we'll die.”

“Part of his mind was screaming, but it was a distant one and easy to ignore.”

“War without end. Well, what was history without that? And how would having the stars change anything?”

“it felt like waking up over and over without falling sleep in between.”

“Nothing wrong with a little optimism, long as it doesn’t set policy....”

“We were full of righteous anger and dreams of vengeance when we got here, and a couple of blowjobs and hangovers later it's like nothing ever happened”

“We're all traitors now.” “Ha!” the old lady said. “Only if we lose.”

“God save us all from good-looking men.”

“The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster.”

“He is, however,” Amos continued, “keeping a constant rail gun lock on the Israel’s reactor.”Holden ran his fingers through his hair. “So not too generous, then.”“Say pretty please, but carry a one-kilo slug of tungsten accelerated to a detectable percentage of c.”

“I mean, yes, I did ask that. But that’s not the part that you should be caring about right now. You lied to me. Your involvement with weaponizing the Protogen project is fully exposed, and that question is like asking what color Tuesday was. It’s meaningless.”

“His strike force stood around him, craning their necks, in awe of the massive emptiness all around. He was almost sorry to pull his attention back to the small, vaguely intimate necessities of violence.”

“Because we can't just blow up enough things that this becomes a good situation.”

“His words were full of hope and threat. Like the stars.”

“Every empire grow until its reach exceeds its grasp”

“Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he’d ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of.”