Babylon's Ashes (Expanse, #6)

by James S.A. Corey

“Shit,” Amos said. “And here I was enjoying being so absolutely thumb-up-the-ass useless.”

Kings were always the last to feel the famine.

“Really, all I’m doing is trying to show everyone on Earth and Mars and the Belt and Medina and the colonies that really we’re all still just one tribe.” “So just transcend all lived human experience since before the dawn of history?” “And keep the part where we kill each other to a minimum,” he said. “Shouldn’t be hard.” “At least you know why you’re tired.”

He’d come to an age when sex was less about who he fell into bed with and more about who he woke up next to,

“Saving humanity doesn’t prevent bone-density loss or muscular atrophy,”

History itself was a massive n=1 study, irreproducible. It was what made it so difficult to learn from.

Earth might be a pile of corpses and shit, but it was their pile of corpses and shit, and she was tired of looking up at it from the moon.

Lifting weights was an argument against a benign God. As if that needed more evidence.

“As long as you always see the next step, you can walk the whole way.”

“An unshakable faith in humanity.” “It’s true,” he said, shaking his head. Or maybe nuzzling a little. “Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.”