275 quotes
It was just easier. She understood now why adults lied to children. It wasn’t love. It was exhaustion.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
This was stupid.
It was worse that stupid. It was dishonest.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
No one asked after Dr. Cortázar. That, Teresa had come to understand, was one of the unwritten rules. When someone disappears, don’t ask why.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
Her shoulders were tight. She felt like they were in the moment between throwing dice and seeing what numbers had come up. The gambler’s high. She didn’t like how much she liked it.
Persepolis Rising (2017)
This was the kind of man who’d killed Julie, Miller thought. Stupid. Shortsighted. A man born with a sense for raw opportunity where his soul should have been.
Leviathan Wakes (2011)
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but it is the mother of any number of other things as well: sacrifice and monstrosity and metamorphosis. Necessity is the mother of all necessary things, to coin a tautology.
Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)
“I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
I’m not, though, Jessyn thought. I’m just feeling a different kind of bad.
The Mercy of Gods (2024)
All the numberless different solutions that evolution had come up with under all the different stars, and all responding—more or less—to the same pressures. Eyes on every world. Mouths near the sense organs, because things with feeding coordination did better than things without.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
He probed himself like a doctor searching for inflammation. Did it hurt here? Did he feel the loss there?
He didn’t. There was only a sense of relief so profound it approached giddiness.
Leviathan Wakes (2011)
He was grandiose. He was ruthless. He was a genius at a couple of things and under the misapprehension that it meant he was smart about everything. But in his mind, he was doing the right thing.
Leviathan Falls (2021)
“The important thing is that we get good data. One person. Lots of people. All the same. But bad experimental design? That’s what sin really is,” Cortázar slurred. “That’s not me either. Nature eats babies all the time.”
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
If they kill us all, Drummer thought, this will be why. Not their technology, not their strategy, not the invisible cycle of history. It’ll be our inability to do anything without five committee meetings to talk about it.
Persepolis Rising (2017)
The question wasn’t whether moving psychoactive alien seedpods between worlds was a good idea so much as whether someone was going to lose face in front of a committee meeting. Thus were the great decisions of history made.
Persepolis Rising (2017)
It was, to say the least, a very high cost and very low probability of success. Singh assumed there was a faith element to the risk that he was just missing. In his opinion, faith was generally for people who were bad at math.
Persepolis Rising (2017)
He had a brief but vivid memory of being seven years old at his grandmother’s vineyard in Nortcoor, looking into the night sky and seeing it for the first time as infinity towering above him like God, only worse because it was real.
The Mercy of Gods (2024)
He considered recording it. His suit would be able to make a simple visual file and stream the data out in real time. But no. This was his moment. His and Julia’s. The rest of humanity could guess what it had been like if they cared.
Leviathan Wakes (2011)
There are no souls, Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you. The only thing that matters is your name.
Abaddon's Gate (2013)
You’re young yet. I’m not. There’s this thing when you get older where you have to make a choice. Everyone does. You have to decide whether you care more about being your best self or your real one. If you’re more loyal to who you ought to be or who you really are.
Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (2022)
Even with all that metal and ceramic crammed into the same little corner of space, even with the relatively tiny thousand klicks across what was the inner face of the Ring, the chances that he’d run into anything were trivial. There was a lot more nothing than something.
Abaddon's Gate (2013)
Humans are structureless. They live in conflict with themselves and each other. Their great genius is rationalization: lying into mirrors until they bully and seduce themselves into things they would never otherwise do. They are creatures of self-delusion, regret, and desire.
The Mercy of Gods (2024)