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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3ff13b6 | Artistic talent is like a brilliant firework which streaks across a pitch-black night, inspiring awe among onlookers but extinguishing itself in seconds, leaving behind only darkness and longing. | Alain de Botton | ||
| a0f8f67 | But at the end of the day, there are some questions that have no answers, and then one answer that has no question: love rules the game. Every time. All the time. That's what counts. | James McBride | ||
| 2677df6 | You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself," my sister Jack told me several times. "Put yourself in God's hands and you can't go wrong." | James McBride | ||
| e6920d1 | The man was the finest preacher. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus. | James McBride | ||
| bf74039 | This is what happens when a boy becomes a man. You get stupider. | James McBride | ||
| 77470a8 | The old face, crinkled and dented with canals running every which way, pushed and shoved up against itself for a while, till a big old smile busted out from beneath 'em all, and his grey eyes fairly glowed. It was the first time I ever saw him smile free. A true smile. It was like looking at the face of God. And I knowed then, for the first time, that him being the person to lead the colored to freedom weren't no lunacy. It was something he.. | god humanity peace slavery | James McBride | |
| 91fea94 | I was ashamed of my mother, but see, love didn't come natural to me until I became a Christian.- Ruth McBride | James McBride | ||
| e81e917 | When Holden pointed out that the Roci was already capable of accelerating fast enough to kill her crew and asked why they'd need to upgrade her, Amos had replied, "Because this shit is awesome." Holden had just nodded and smiled and paid the bill. Even" | James S.A. Corey | ||
| ebe4607 | Aw, you goddammed bastards! They're shootin' him while he's down! Son of a bitch!" The ship stopped moving, and Alex said in a quiet voice, "Suck on this, asshole." The ship vibrated for half a second, then paused before continuing toward the lock. "Point defense cannons?" Holden asked. "Summary roadside justice," Alex grunted back." | military retribution space-combat | James S.A. Corey | |
| 93c8f2d | Intellectually, he knew he wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice himself or his happiness to save everyone else. But that didn't stop the tiny voice at the back of his head that said, Fuck everyone else, I want my girlfriend back. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 1a5fe31 | Could we please not assault the patient with the crushed spinal cord," she said as she did, "because this makes me very uncomfortable." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 3a1e146 | Holden shot him in the throat. Somewhere in his brain stem, Detective Miller nodded in approval. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| dd87f20 | He'd read accounts of extravehicular euphoria, but the experience was unlike anything he'd imagined. He was the eye of God, drinking in the light of infinite stars, and he was a speck of dust on a speck of dust, clipped by his mag boots to the body of a ship unthinkably more powerful than himself, and unimportant before the face of the abyss. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| eaab746 | A guy I once knew tried to justify his life choices to me by comparing himself to Genghis Khan." "I take it you didn't find his argument compelling?" Murtry asked with a smirk. "No," Holden said. "And then a friend of mine shot him in the face." "An ironic rebuttal to an argument about necessary violence." "I thought so too, at the time." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 829f0d3 | He felt the decision like a seed crystal giving form to the chaos around it, solid, hard, resolute. Desperation, mourning, and a million farewells, one to the other. The word quarantine came to him, and with the logic of dreams, it carried an unsupportable weight of horror. But within it, like the last voice in Pandora's box, the promise of reunion. One day, when the solution was found, everything that had been lost would be regained. The g.. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| d131240 | The concrete replaces the forest. You get in its way, you get paved over. If you can find a way to live in the cracks, you can thrive anywhere. There were always cracks. | forest | James S.A. Corey | |
| bf59566 | She preferred the times when she could pretend that she was in a gravity well to the little reminders that she was the puppet of acceleration and inertia. | gravity gravity-well inertia space-travel spaceships | James S.A. Corey | |
| 29e603b | The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won't stop a missile, though. It won't alter the trajectory of a gauss round. | missile morality morals realist | James S.A. Corey | |
| 17a054a | Too many people with too many agendas, and everyone was worried that the other guy would shoot them in the back. Of all the ways to go and meet the God-like alien whatever-they-were that built the protomolecule, this was the stupidest, the most dangerous, and--for Bull's money--the most human. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| dc50762 | So are you conscious?" The alien robot--the skin the Miller construct was using--shrugged. It was strange how well the gesture translated. "Don't know. Seems like I'm acing my Turing test, though." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| a55d4c9 | Alex said. "This is Medina Station under occupation by a bunch of splinter Martian military expats. It's not Baltimore." Amos' smile was as placid as always. "Everywhere's Baltimore." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 69b33f4 | Trashy people puke," Tilly said. "Ladies are unwell." | puke trashy unwell vomit | James S.A. Corey | |
| 13aa3ee | The same beautiful bullshit that everyone told themselves. That they were special. That they mattered. That some vast intelligence behind the curtains of reality cared what happened to them. And in all the history of the species, they'd all died anyway. "Attention," | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 0fb3fba | It's all fun and games till someone shoots back, Holden thought. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| c0964de | Yeah," Chris said. "I lose a couple limbs getting drunk and falling into harvesting combine, I'm an idiot. I lose the same limbs because I happened to be standing next to the right door when the ship was damaged, I'm a hero." | humor sarcasm | James S.A. Corey | |
| 7b5ddd5 | Rebecca Byers, the comm officer on duty, could have been bred from a shark and a hatchet. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 6025bd2 | All beautiful things should have just a little sorrow about them. Made them seem real. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 5b1db67 | During his time as a graduate student, he had done data collection for a study of Pinus contorata. Of all the varieties of pine to rise off Earth, lodgepole pine had been the most robust in low-g environments. His job had been to collect the fallen cones and burn them for the seeds. In the wild, lodgepole pine wouldn't germinate without fire; the resin in the cones encouraged a hotter fire, even when it meant the death of the parental tree... | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 103b18e | Choosing to stand by while people kill each other is also an action, | James S.A. Corey | ||
| d32ace4 | Chapter Fourteen: Teresa "So not unnatural at all," Holden said, tipping a little more wine from the bottle into the doctor's glass. "Meaningless term," Cortazar said. "Humans arose inside nature. We're natural. Everything we do is natural. The whole idea that we are different in category is either sentimental or religious. Irrelevant from a scientific perspective." Tiamat's Wrath" | holden the-expanse-tiamat-s-wrath | James S.A. Corey | |
| cd45a4b | The messages coming back flooded the comm buffers with rage and sorrow, threats of vengeance and offers of aid. Those last were the hardest. New colonies still trying to force their way into local ecosystems so exotic that their bodies could hardly recognize them as life at all, isolated, exhausted, sometimes at the edge of their resources. And what they wanted was to send back help. He listened to their voices, saw the distress in their ey.. | helping-others humanism inspirational refugees sacrifice war war-relief | James S.A. Corey | |
| 860179b | if you hear hoofbeats in the distance, your first guess is that they're horses, not zebras. And you're hearing hoofbeats and jumping straight to unicorns. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 15dcd76 | Easy to make rules," Emma said. "Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it's the person's fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that's worth shit, we've done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 222c8be | Downtime's easier to enjoy when I know it'll end. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 70f8695 | It had been a failure, but it was a failure he understood, and that made it a victory. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 24829eb | Just do not pull that fucking trigger. Do you understand what I'm saying? Don't. You will be personally responsible for the deadliest screwup in the history of humankind, and I'm on a ship with Jim fucking Holden, so the bar's not low. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 6623f3c | It seemed to her that the real sign you were getting old was when you stopped needing to prove you weren't getting old. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 39245ef | 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." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 6a686e9 | They'd never precisely been friends, but they'd managed to stop the human race from being wiped out by a corporation's self-induced sociopathy and a recovered alien weapon that everyone in human history had mistaken for a moon of Saturn. By that standard, at least, the partnership had been a success. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 0daadeb | You take care of your tools, your tools take care of you. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 227c554 | 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 to.. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 3fa6022 | My job in my work is not to acquire power; it's to question power. | Anna Deavere Smith | ||
| da2f523 | This idea the Greeks had of him is best summed up not by a poet, but by a philosopher, Plato: "Love--Eros--makes his home in men's hearts, but not in every heart, for where there is hardness he departs. His greatest glory is that he cannot do wrong nor allow it; force never comes near him. For all men serve him of their own free will. And he whom Love touches not walks in darkness." | Edith Hamilton | ||
| f7cb590 | The Greeks were realists. They saw the beauty of common things and were content with it. | perception perspective | Edith Hamilton |