39 quotes
Alex worried about that. Jillian was mean as a snake. When he’d told Bobbie that, she’d responded, I just make sure she never runs out of mice. He still didn’t know quite what that meant.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
This was the problem with thousand-year Reichs. They came and they went like fireflies.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
She had been a pawn in Holden’s chess game. And Holden had gotten her to the last rank and promoted her to a queen.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
That was the thing about hubris. It only became clear in retrospect.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
That’s what decades of marriage were for. Intimacy and pattern matching as a kind of telepathy.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
It had seemed like a kind of magnanimity at the time. It looked more like necessity now.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
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)
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)
“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)
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 too late.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
Evolution was a paste-and-baling-wire process that came up with half-assed solutions like pushing teeth through babies’ gums and menstruation. Survival of the fittest was a technical term that covered a lot more close-enough-is-close-enough than actual design.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
But all the stories about the devil making a deal and then cheating missed the point. The real horror was that once the bargain was struck, the devil didn’t cheat. He gave you exactly and explicitly all that had been promised.
And the price was your soul.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
The woman herself looked down at hem from where she was etched in stone. It was probably just his imagination, but she seemed amused. Like now that she was dead and not actually responsible for fixing any of the vast and secret shit show that was human history, she finally got the joke.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
It was the single central argument that the universe had made to her through her whole life, and she was only now seeing it clearly: Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled. Anything else was just a postponement of the next round of violence.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
The universe is always stranger than you think.
It didn’t matter how broad her imagination was, how cynical, how joyous and open, how well researched or wild minded. The universe was always stranger. Every dream, every imagining, however lavish and improbable, inevitably fell short of the truth.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)
Duarte was a thoughtful, educated, civilized man and a murderer. He was charming and funny and a little melancholy and, as far as Holden could tell, completely unaware of his own monstrous ambition. Like a religious fanatic, the man really believed that everything he’d done was justified by his goal in doing it.
Tiamat's Wrath (2019)