The Vital Abyss (Expanse, #5.5)

by James S.A. Corey

There is a period of developmental sociopathy in every

I have heard it said that how you spend your day is how you spend your life, and my days changed then.

I began to keep a book of ignorance: questions that existing information could not answer and my amateurish, half-educated thoughts about how answers might be found.

Humanity is social, and the self-image of humans is built from the versions of ourselves we see and hear reflected in others;

The room was pulling itself apart like a cell preparing to divide.

There is nothing so destructive and also so easy to overlook as a bad idea.

me. I remember defining myself by the opinions of people around me. My worth had been determined from without, by how I imagined that I appeared to others. That is what being a social animal is, after all. Emotional and definitional interdependence. I remembered it like remembering that I once knew a song, but not the melody itself.

That piqued me, but this wasn’t the moment to sit with it. Brown’s open shell gave me my opportunity, and I drove my knife in to keep him from closing again.

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.

Hope survives even stretched to a single molecule’s thickness.

Someone would have to be brilliant and driven and above all lucky to have even a handful of moments like that in the span of a stellar and celebrated career. I had five or six of them every shift.