Memory's Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection (The Expanse)

by James S.A. Corey

“Because distance is measured in time.” “And coherence is measured in beer,”

“All in favor?” There was a small chorus. “The ayes have it,” Voltaire said. “Someone buy this man another drink.”

Politics and history gave way to art and fine-structure engineering.

He wonders if that’s what makes the promised land holy: that you can see it but you can’t quite reach it.

The whole thing had been like having a very long, pleasant, but kind of boring dream. And it had left his head feeling a little hazy in a way he didn’t enjoy.

“They don’t hate us,” Bobbie said, her voice tired. “They’re afraid of us.” “Then why do they act like they hate us?” David’s father said with something like triumph. “Because that’s what fear looks like when it needs someplace to go.”

“You’re a tough guy, but I’m a nightmare wrapped in the apocalypse.

She was Lydia, and he was Timmy. In the bent and broken world, what they did fit. It was more than most people had.

Two points defined a line, but three defined the playing field.

Liev was a man of deep habits and consistent tastes.

The hardest lesson Burton had ever learned was to endure the blows, accept the damage, and let someone else strike back.

as if lobsters had crawled up out of the sea and started speaking Spanish. And yet if they did, what could anyone do but answer them,

The “crane shot” image when the police are converging on Liev through the crowd, for instance, isn’t one anybody in the story could have seen, but the narrator can, and so the reader can. It changes the voice of the story in ways that were tricky and interesting.

A lot of Amos’ character requires forgoing the customary moral judgments. For better or worse.

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

caught between investing in a future I couldn’t imagine and losing myself in a grief I couldn’t fully encompass.

I remember many of those former selves with a distance that is more than time.

If intellect and focus were indeed the legacies of my invisible father, emotional manipulation was my mother’s true gift, and it was as valuable. As important.

There is a period of developmental sociopathy in every life,

a victim of depression so profound it made bathing or eating food a challenge.

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

I spent my glorious hour, the pinnacle of my new life, trying not to vomit. I didn’t know whether to imagine my mother’s spirit viewing me from the afterlife with pride or despair.

The cravings were like hunger or thirst or overwhelming lust, and I only postponed acting on them by promising myself that if I still wanted so badly when I was done, I would indulge myself to death. I anticipated my eventual overdose like a zealot looking forward to Armageddon.

The difference, and I think it was the only difference, came from not caring anymore.

Time had eaten some of my memory and likely falsified some as well. The core of it remained, though.

I astonished myself. To have come so far, through so much, and still be so naïve…

Bad data is just another way of saying needless suffering.

We were sharing a container of white kibble that looked like malformed rice and tasted like the unholy offspring of a chicken and a mushroom.

“For whom the bell tolls?

And because it was the most habitable of the new planets by orders of magnitude, it was developed. Because it was developed, it was influential. Because it was influential, it was wealthy. And because it was wealthy, it was corrupt.

Overdoing is also falling short. Better to have a good night end well than push for perfect and undo what had been achieved.

There was nothing like being told no to make someone attractive.

money was like sex. You thought it would fix everything until you got a lot of it.

There’s this thing when you get older where you have to make a choice. Everyone does. You have to decide whether you care more about being your best self or your real one. If you’re more loyal to who you ought to be or who you really are.

One of the joys of the project has always been how we were able to play around with genre. Science fiction is great that way. There’s not a particular story at the root of it the way there is with other genres.

Science fiction can be anything from a rigorous speculative adventure like Andy Weir’s The Martian, to a semi-hallucinatory philosophical allegory by Philip K. Dick, to a locked-room mystery on a spaceship. There’s room for all of it.

“Wake up.” “Can’t wake up,” Filip said. “I died. Dead men don’t wake up.” “You didn’t die.” “Then why do I hurt so much?” “Because you didn’t die,”

He wasn’t even certain what he was anxious about. There were so many options.

The only point is that our parents can lay burdens on us, all without meaning to, that we’ll have to carry around for the rest of our lives and there’s nothing we can do about that. But you and I still get to decide how we carry those burdens.”

“Thank you, but I don’t deserve any mercy.” “Of course you don’t. That’s why they call it mercy. If you deserve it, they call it justice.”

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

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