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.”

IF LIFE TRANSCENDS DEATH, THEN I WILL SEEK FOR YOU THERE. IF NOT, THEN THERE TOO.

There are people I love. There are people who have loved me. I fought for what I believed, protected those I could, and stood my ground against the encroaching darkness. Good enough.

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.

But all the stories about the devil making a deal and then cheating missed the point. The real horror was that once the bargain was struck, the devil didn’t cheat. He gave you exactly and explicitly all that had been promised.

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.

“This may not help,” he said, “but part of what you’re feeling right now is normal. 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.”

That was the thing about hubris. It only became clear in retrospect.