Babylon's Ashes (Expanse, #6)

by James S.A. Corey

who were waiting at the corners and in the doorways

and it was easier to stay aloof than to engage.

Newton’s third law expressed as violence.

I have killed, but I am not a killer because a killer is a monster, and monsters aren’t afraid.

Situations change and clinging too tightly to what came before kills you.

“We’re not people,” he said. “We’re the stories that people tell each other about us.

We always react to the stories about people, not who they really are.”

I have never seen that ethos betrayed more profoundly than this.

Centuries of technology and progress had allowed humanity to create a place for itself in the vacuum and radiation of space, but nothing had overcome entropy or ideology or bad judgment.

Desiderata of Bhagavathi

It felt less like a pirate ship than a temple. Maybe there was room for both.

Humanity hadn’t changed, but it had. The venality and the nobility, the cruelty and the grace. They were all still there. It was just the particulars he felt shifting away from under him. Everything he’d fought for seemed to belong to a different man in a different time. Well. It was in the nature of torches to be passed. Nothing to be sad about in that. Except that he was sad.

There had been a moment when that child had waved into a camera, decades ago, not knowing the gesture was also his last.

Holden was the kind of guy who smoked himself down to the filter if he thought it was the right thing to do.

You use a welding rig to weld things. You use a gun to shoot things. You use a Bobbie Draper to fuck a bunch of bad guys permanently up.”

A decent idea now is way better than a brilliant plan when it’s too late.”

He looked like a kid who just realized he’d jumped in the deep end of the pool and was trying to figure out whether he should embarrass himself by shouting for help or drown with a little dignity.

If he’d been cast down, he could at least have taken some pride in having been wronged.

Like time pressed flat.

Hers was not the beauty of youth but of experience, same as his.

It wasn’t as though they had a second Earth to use as a control. History itself was a massive n=1 study, irreproducible. It was what made it so difficult to learn from.

She sounded so weary, it made Naomi want to go back to sleep in sympathy.

“No plan survives contact with the enemy,”

The long practice of trivial intimacy.

He felt Naomi’s shrug against his body, familiar as if he’d done it himself. “I know what I need to deal with next. I’ve got two attack ships crawling up my ass, ready to kill me and all the people I love most in life. And if they manage it, my evil ex-boyfriend may very well grind all human civilization in the system into a new dark age.” “Yeah. That guy’s an asshole.” “Yup.”

even their freedom seemed ominous.

The autonomy and freedom the Free Navy promised was balanced on the head of a pin.

There would always be hoarders and price gouging, people who closed their doors to refugees and left them freezing and starving. But the impulse to help was there too. To carry a burden together, even if it meant having less for yourself. Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other, and Holden had to take comfort in that. The sense that however terrible humanity’s failings were, there was still a little more in them worth admiring.

Peace was a time for efficiency. War was a time for power.

Humiliation was always better than violence. To beat a man—even to beat a man to death—was at least proof that you took him seriously as a man.

But discomfort was the home of the warrior, now as it had always been.

If wars began with rage, they ended with exhaustion.

“Politics is the art of the possible, Captain Pa. When you play at our level, grudges cost lives.”

But she didn’t want the moment to end either, any of the moments with these people in this place, even though eventually they had to. No, not even though. Because. Because eventually they had to. Nothing lasted forever. Not peace. Not war. Nothing.

Some things were secret even after you told them.

The problem, of course, with the idea of nature versus nurture was that it posed a choice between determinisms.