Tiamat's Wrath (The Expanse, #8)

by James S.A. Corey

“The people who have power over you are weak too. They shit and bleed and worry that their children don’t love them anymore. They’re embarrassed by the stupid things they did when they were young that everyone else has forgotten. And so they’re vulnerable. We all define ourselves by the people around us, because that’s the kind of monkey we are. We can’t transcend it. So when they watch you, they hand you the power to change what they are too.”

When two people get in a fight, and only one has a gun and the will to use it? That’s a short damned fight.

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.

Growing older was a falling away of everything that didn’t matter. And a deepening appreciation of all the parts that were important enough to stay.

The ones you trust are always the most dangerous.

History took whatever it found and used it for what was happening at the time, remaking the spaces into whatever worked well enough to get by at the moment, until history itself became a kind of architect.

Nothing died without becoming the foundation for what came after.

Getting what you want fucks you up.

There was no better way to seem trustworthy than to be liked by a dog, and there was no better way to convince a dog to like you than bribery.

This was the problem with thousand-year Reichs. They came and they went like fireflies.

There’s a moment that everyone eventually experiences when they see that their parents are just people. That these mythic figures in their lives are also struggling and guessing. Doing their best without knowing for certain what their best is.”