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Time was supposed to heal all wounds. To Drummer, that was just a nice way of saying that if she waited long enough, none of the things that seemed important to her would turn out to matter. Or at least not the way she’d thought they did.
It seemed to her that the real sign you were getting old was when you stopped needing to prove you weren’t getting old.
Every great nation, they said, was founded on a knife and a lie.
On the float, Clarissa’s tears didn’t fall. Surface tension held them to her until she shook her head, and then they’d form a dozen scattered balls of saline that in time would get sucked into the recycler and leave the air smelling a little more of sorrow and the sea.
The deep human instinct to come together in crisis. To take care of each other. In its best light, it was what made humanity human. But he also had the dark suspicion that it was a kind of bargaining. Look, universe, see how kind and gentle and nice I am? Don’t let the hammer fall on me.
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.
In his opinion, faith was generally for people who were bad at math.
It was an interesting fact of her brief captaincy that the only time anyone seemed to want her to make a decision was when it was one she didn’t want to make.
The hard laws of orbital mechanics and time placed every base, every planet, every person predictably in front of their own personal firing squads. Situations like this one, they could see death coming, and it didn’t matter. Death still came.
The universe was tricky, and its sense of humor came with teeth.
Every time someone starts talking about final anythings in politics, that means the atrocities are warming up. Humanity has done amazing things by just muddling through, arguing and complaining and fighting and negotiating. It’s messy and undignified, but it’s when we’re at our best, because everyone gets to have a voice in it. Even if everyone else is trying to shout it down. Whenever there’s just one voice that matters, something terrible comes out of it.”
Your empire’s hands look a lot cleaner when you get to dictate where history begins and what parts of it don’t count.”
I am a human being. Anything that happens to human beings could happen to me.
A red border was painted around the frame, with warnings in half a dozen languages that all meant Please be careful. There’s a lot of things in here that we’ll have to fix after they finish killing you.
“It’s the reward of old age,” Avasarala said. “You live long enough, and you can watch everything you worked for become irrelevant.”
