Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection

by James S.A. Corey

“That’s what peace is, right? Postponing the conflict until the thing you were fighting over doesn’t matter.”

From when Moses saw the promised land that he could never enter, people have been on their deathbeds just wanting to see what happens next. He wonders if that’s what makes the promised land holy: that you can see it but you can’t quite reach it. The grass is always greener on the other side of personal extinction.

I have learned to question my assumptions about what other people feel.

There is nothing so destructive and also so easy to overlook as a bad idea.

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but it is the mother of any number of other things as well: sacrifice and monstrosity and metamorphosis. Necessity is the mother of all necessary things, to coin a tautology.

The universe was always vast, if he thought about it. The trick was not to see more of it than he could stand at any given moment. And picking the right part to look at.

Doing the right thing has to be enough in itself. It’s not about getting the pat on the head.

And the end isn’t really entirely the end. One of the central arguments we’ve made with these stories is that, when you look at history, you see the same kind of people doing the same stupid, selfish, delusional, gorgeous, kind, astonishing things that we do today. And we’ll keep doing the same, as long as the species survives. Technical knowledge advances. The organism stays the same.

We’re spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle.