Leviathan Wakes (2011)

All page numbers from the trade paperback first edition published by Orbit Books ISBN 978-1-335-00510-6
Published in collaboration with Ty Franck under the pseudonym James S. A. Corey
Nominated for the 2012 Hugo Award

• Say what you will about organized crime, at least it’s organized.
  • Chapter 2 (p. 20)

• If Miller had ever been called upon to describe her, the phrase deceptive coloration would have figured in.
  • Chapter 2 (p. 21)

• “Too many dots,” Miller said. “Not enough lines.”
  • Chapter 10 (p. 109)

• The enlisted guys will be okay, but the officers get the sense of humor trained out of ’em.
  • Chapter 11 (p. 113)

• It was a real book—onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent.
  • Chapter 14 (p. 150)

• If things got out of hand, it would mean six or seven million dead people and the end of everything Miller had ever known.
  Odd that it should feel almost like relief.
  • Chapter 16 (p. 164)

• He couldn’t fix the cancer of war, couldn’t even slow down the spread, but at least he could admit it was happening.
  • Chapter 16 (p. 164)

• She didn’t care. Not caring was how she got through the day.
  • Chapter 16 (p. 170)

• “See, this is why I can’t ever be in command,” she said.
  “Don’t like making tough calls with incomplete information?”
  “More I’m not suicidally irresponsible,” she replied.
  • Chapter 17 (pp. 178-179)

• The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending.
  • Chapter 18 (p. 184)

• Never knew if you had any luck left unless you pushed it.
  • Chapter 18 (p. 187)

• It’s the problem with politics. Your enemies are often your allies. And vice versa.
  • Chapter 19 (p. 194)

• He probed himself like a doctor searching for inflammation. Did it hurt here? Did he feel the loss there?
  He didn’t. There was only a sense of relief so profound it approached giddiness.
  • Chapter 22 (p. 226)

• All bluster, no balls.
  • Chapter 22 (p. 228)

• This was the kind of man who’d killed Julie, Miller thought. Stupid. Shortsighted. A man born with a sense for raw opportunity where his soul should have been.
  • Chapter 28 (p. 281)

• When, Miller wondered, does someone stop being human? There had to be a moment, some decision that you made and before it, you were one person, and after it, someone else...If he’d seen it in someone else—Muss, Havelock, Sematimba—he wouldn’t have taken more than a minute to realize they’d gone off the rails. Since it was him, he had taken longer to notice. But Holden was right. Somewhere along the line, he’d lost himself.
  • Chapter 28 (p. 284)

• “There’s a right thing to do,” Holden said.
  “You don’t have a right thing, friend,” Miller said. “You’ve got a whole plateful of maybe a little less wrong.”
  • Chapter 36 (p. 363)

• “We regret the necessity of this action,” she said to everyone everywhere. “But in the cause of freedom, there can be no compromise.”
  That’s what it’s come to, Miller thought, rubbing a hand across his chin. Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then we’ll be free.
  • Chapter 36 (p. 364)

• There was life out there. They had proof of it now. And the proof came in the shape of a weapon, so what did that tell him?
  • Chapter 38 (p. 379)

• Holden decided that he was okay with not feeling any remorse for them. The moral complexity of the situation had grown past his ability to process it, so he just relaxed in the warm glow of victory instead.
  • Chapter 41 (p. 412)

• Liquor doesn’t make you feel better. Just makes you not so worried about feeling bad.
  • Chapter 42 (p. 427)

• “Stop,” Holden said. “I don’t care. I don’t want to hear any more of your stories about how being a cop makes you wiser and deeper and able to face the truth about humanity. As far as I can tell, all it did was break you. Okay?”
  “Yeah, okay.”
  “Dresden and his Protogen buddies thought they could choose who lives and who dies. That sound familiar? And don’t tell me it’s different this time, because everyone says that, every time. And it’s not.”
  • Chapter 43 (p. 437)

• And now they were making music from the screams of the dying. Of the dead. The were dancing to it in the low-rent clubs. What it must be like, Miller thought, to be young and soulless.
  But no. That wasn’t fair. Diogo was a good kid. He was just naive. The universe would take care of that, given a little time.
  • Chapter 44 (p. 445)

• Miller was staring at him like an entomologist trying to figure out exactly where the pin went.
  • Chapter 45 (p. 457)

• If Fred couldn’t build himself a peace treaty, the OPA would never win against the discipline and unity of an inner planet navy. But they would also never lose. War without end.
  Well, what was history if not that?
  And how would having the stars change anything?
  • Chapter 46 (p. 467)

• He considered recording it. His suit would be able to make a simple visual file and stream the data out in real time. But no. This was his moment. His and Julia’s. The rest of humanity could guess what it had been like if they cared.
  • Chapter 48 (p. 488)

• It was as easy as keying in a door code. Somehow he felt that arming fusion bombs to detonate around him should have been more difficult.
  • Chapter 50 (p. 504)

• He cut the connection before she could answer. Long goodbyes weren’t anyone’s strong suit.
  • Chapter 50 (p. 504)

• That man could take a visitation from God with thirty underdressed angels announcing that sex was okay after all and make it seem vaguely depressing.
  • Epilogue (p. 560)

Caliban's War (2012)

All page numbers from the trade paperback first edition published by Orbit Books ISBN 978-0-316-12906-0, 17th printing
Published in collaboration with Ty Franck under the pseudonym James S. A. Corey

• The mirror plummeting toward the surface of Ganymede—toward his greenhouse, his soybeans, his life’s work—hadn’t chosen anything. It was a victim of cause and effect, the same as everything else.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 26)

• The rich scent of well-balanced soil was like incense.
  • Chapter 7 (p. 76)

• I’ve been through a lot of hearings about one damn thing and another. Most of the time they’re exercises in ass covering. If the unvarnished truth ever came out at one, it would be because someone screwed up.
  • Chapter 9 (pp. 93-94)

• Do not underestimate his capacity to fuck things up.
  • Chapter 9 (p. 100)

• The intensity of your feelings isn’t evidence.
  • Chapter 22 (p. 243)

• “I’m not a traitor,” Bobbie said to her reflection in the mirror. Mirror Bobbie looked unconvinced.
  • Chapter 25 (p. 268)

• Familiarity might breed contempt, but Bobbie hadn’t much liked Soren right from the start.
  • Chapter 25 (p. 272)

• When Bobbie tried to imagine being so wealthy you could own a spaceship just to compete in races, she failed. That the same girl had run away to be an OPA rebel probably said a lot about the relationship of wealth and contentment, but Bobbie had a hard time being that philosophical.
  • Chapter 30 (pp. 329-330)

• Owning your own racing ship wasn’t even wealth. It was like speciation. It was conspicuous consumption befitting ancient Earth royalty, a pharaoh’s pyramid with a reaction drive.
  • Chapter 30 (p. 330)

• “That’s not the game,” Avasarala said. “No one gets shot. They get marginalized. It’s worse.”
  “No, it’s not. I’ve seen people shot. I’ve seen my friends shot. When you say, ‘That’s not the game,’ you mean for people like you. Not like me.”
  Avasarala’s expression cooled.
  “Yes, that’s what I mean,” the old woman said. “The level we’re playing at has different rules. It’s like playing go. It’s all about exerting influence. Controlling the board without occupying it.”
  “Poker is a game, too,” Bobbie said. “But sometimes the stakes get so high that one player decides it’s easier to kill the other guy and walk away with the money. It happens all the time.”
  • Chapter 30 (p. 331)

• She’d stopped looking tired a while ago and had moved on to whatever tired turns into when it became a lifestyle.
  • Chapter 30 (p. 334)

• “I’m not asking you to sleep with him.”
  “Good, because I don’t use sex as a weapon,” Bobbie said. “I use weapons as weapons.”
  • Chapter 30 (p. 335)

• It took his breath away. The elegance and functionality of the structure lay out before him, as beautiful and simple and effective as a leaf or a root cluster. To have something so much like the fruits of evolution, but designed by human minds, was awe-inspiring. It was the pinnacle of what creativity meant, the impossible made real.
  • Chapter 31 (p. 344)

• There was justice to be had.
  He just couldn’t afford it.
  • Chapter 31 (p. 350)

• They were willing to risk a hole in the ship emptying out half the ship’s air rather than let her up to the bridge. It was sort of gratifying to be scarier than sudden decompression.
  • Chapter 38 (p. 420)

• The proportions, the black hair, the dark eyes, everything was the same. Only, giant. It short-circuited his neural wiring. The lizard living at the back of his brain kept jumping back and forth between Mate with it! and Flee from it!
  • Chapter 42 (p. 459)

• “No,” Avasarala said.
  “Uh, no? You might be forgetting whose ship you’re on.”
  “I’m sorry, did I seem to give a fuck that this is your ship? If I did, really, I was just being polite.”
  • Chapter 42 (p. 462)

• Desperate psychotic people do desperate psychotic things when they’re exposed. I refuse to grant them immunity from exposure out of fear of their reaction. When you do, the desperate psychos wind up in charge.
  • Chapter 42 (p. 463)

• “Reputation never has very much to do with reality,” she said. “I could name half a dozen paragons of virtue that are horrible, small-souled, evil people. And some of the best men I know, you’d walk out of the room if you heard their names. No one on the screen is who they are when you breathe their air.
  • Chapter 45 (p. 491)

• “Why aren’t you doing that?”
  “Do you want the real reason, or my justification?”
  • Chapter 45 (p. 492)

• The holy fool who’d dragged the solar system into war and seemed utterly blind to the damage he caused. An idealist. The most dangerous kind of man there was.
  • Chapter 45 (p. 493)

• If life transcends death, then I will seek for you there. If not, then there too.
  • Chapter 45 (p. 494)

• That man’s asshole must be tight enough right now to bend space.
  • Chapter 45 (p. 497)

• The truth was her version wasn’t any more or less a fantasy than his. No one would know for sure until everyone knew for sure.
  • Chapter 47 (p. 510)

• “Space is too fucking big. It’s the same old story.”
  He’d guessed right. She just wanted to talk, so he let her. “What story?”
  “Empire. Every empire grows until its reach exceeds its grasp. We started out fighting over who got the best branches in one tree. Then we climb down and fight over a few kilometers’ worth of trees. Then someone starts riding horses, and you get empires of hundreds or thousands of kilometers. Ships open up empire expansion across the oceans. The Epstein drive gave us the outer planets...”
  She trailed off and tapped out something on the comm panel. She didn’t volunteer who she was sending messages to, and Holden didn’t ask. When she was done, she said, “But the story is always the same. No matter how good your technology is, at some point you’ll conquer territory that you can’t hold on to.”
  “You’re talking about the outer planets?”
  “Not specifically,” she said, her voice growing soft and thoughtful. “I’m talking about the entire fucking concept of empire. The Brits couldn’t hold on to India or North America because why should people listen to a king who’s six thousand kilometers away?”
  • Chapter 47 (p. 511)

• I hope we don’t start shooting, but what I hope will happen and what actually happens are almost never the same.
  • Chapter 47 (p. 514)

• There was a time, Prax knew, that the violence would have bothered him. Not the blood or bodies. He’d spent more than enough time doing dissections and even autonomous-limb vivisection to be able to wall off what he was seeing from any particular sense of visceral horror. But that it was something done in anger, that the men and women he’d just seen blown apart hadn’t donated their bodies or tissues, would have affected him once. The universe had taken that from him, and he couldn’t say now exactly when it had happened. Part of him was numb, and maybe it always would be. There was a feeling of loss in that, but it was intellectual.
  • Chapter 51 (p. 563)

• That night’s selection was called Windblown Grass. It didn’t exactly smell like grass to Holden, but it was nice. Just a hint of earthiness to it. Holden had a suspicion that all perfumes were named randomly, anyway.
  • Chapter 53 (p. 579)

• That’s not a government, it’s a rugby scrum with a currency.
  • Chapter 53 (p. 582)

Abaddon's Gate (2013)

All page numbers from the trade paperback first edition published by Orbit Books ISBN 978-0-316-12907-7, 1st printing
Published in collaboration with Ty Franck under the pseudonym James S. A. Corey

• Even with all that metal and ceramic crammed into the same little corner of space, even with the relatively tiny thousand klicks across what was the inner face of the Ring, the chances that he’d run into anything were trivial. There was a lot more nothing than something.
  • Prologue (p. 6)

• Ashford has only ever done a right thing because he’s afraid of being embarrassed. He’s a pretty uniform surrounding vacuum. And you can’t rely on that.
  • Chapter 2 (p. 29)

• “We came out here with an operational plan,” she said. “If we start rewriting it every time we find an adjustment we’d like to make, we might as well not have bothered.”
  Privately, Bull thought the same thing, but with a different inflection. If he’d been XO, the operational plan would have been called a suggested guideline and only opened when he wanted a good laugh.
  • Chapter 5 (p. 51)

• “Annie,” Tilly said. “If I wanted to suck vile fluids out of a flaccid and indifferent tube, I’d have stayed on Earth with my husband.”
  • Chapter 5 (p. 52)

• What had been logical became dumb, and all it took was changing the context.
  • Chapter 9 (p. 94)

• “Same here, Cap’n,” Amos said. “I got a lot of past in my past.”
  • Chapter 10 (p. 107)

• There are no souls, Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you. The only thing that matters is your name.
  • Chapter 11 (p. 121)

• That kind of attention changes people, and it don’t make them better.
  • Chapter 11 (p. 122)

• No one can blather on like a holy man with a trapped audience. Well, maybe a politician.
  • Chapter 12 (p. 128)

• Theological anthropology is a lot simpler when humans are the only ones with souls.
  • Chapter 12 (p. 129)

• Traveling between the planets had never eliminated murder. So many highly evolved primates in the same box for months on end, a certain death rate had to be expected.
  • Chapter 14 (p. 148)

• It was a lesson he’d never forgotten. That humans only have so much emotional energy. No matter how intense the situation, or how powerful the feelings, it was impossible to maintain a heightened emotional state forever. Eventually you’d just get tired and want it to end.
  • Chapter 22 (p. 230)

• If you’re aiming not to creep me the hell out, you need more practice.
  • Chapter 25 (p. 264)

• “I don’t think he sees it that way,” Pa said. And then, “But I think he’s putting a lot of effort into not seeing it that way.”
  • Chapter 29 (p. 313)

• Her fantasies of it were so strong, they were like memories.
  • Chapter 31 (p. 329)

• “Trashy people puke,” Tilly said. “Ladies are unwell.”
  • Chapter 31 (p. 331)

• History is made up of people recovering from the last disaster.
  • Chapter 32 (p. 335)

• “The devil is here,” Cortez said. He shook his head at Anna’s protesting frown. “Not some cartoon demon. I’m not a fool. But the devil has always lived in men when they reach too far, when they fail to ask if they should do something just because they can do it.”
  • Chapter 32 (pp. 335-336)

• Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it.
  A few people liked to paint this drive as a weakness. A failing of the species. Humanity as the virus. The creature that never stops filling up its available living space. Hector seemed to be moving over to that view, based on their last conversation. But Anna rejected that idea. If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’d all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She’d looked up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She’d tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity, that had put her there.
  Looking at the tiny world spinning around her, she knew one day it would give them the stars as well.
  • Chapter 32 (p. 337)

• “I’m getting a medal for falling into a pressure hatch, sacrificing an arm and a leg to keep seven sailors from being trapped in a compromised part of the ship. I was unconscious at the time, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they’d never do if they were really thinking about it.”
  • Chapter 32 (p. 338)

• Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.
  • Chapter 35 (p. 365)

• If the UN wants to space her, I’ll push the damn button myself.
  • Chapter 36 (p. 375)

• After a certain point, the past becomes irrelevant.
  • Chapter 38 (pp. 387-388)

• God might not care about financial standing, but He was the only one.
  • Chapter 39 (p. 398)

• We keep acting without thinking and you think the solution is to do it one more time. You have allied yourself with stupid, violent men, and you are trying to convince yourself that being stupid and violent will work. That makes you stupid too. I will never help you. I’ll fight you now.
  • Chapter 39 (p. 404)

• He still wasn’t sure whether he believed it was true, even. But right now, it needed to be, and so it was.
  • Chapter 41 (p. 423)

• I’ve been famous before. It’s not so great.
  • Chapter 43 (p. 436)

• Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas. It’s attractive because it’s simple, it’s direct, it’s almost always available as an option. When you can’t think of a good rebuttal for your opponent’s argument, you can always punch them in the face.
  • Chapter 44 (p. 444)

• She wondered what it said about her that she’d watched a woman shot to death not two hours before and all she could think about now was lunch.
  • Chapter 46 (p. 466)

• There’s a difference between tragedy and evil, and I am that difference.
  • Chapter 46 (p. 468)

• When what came next didn’t matter, anybody could do anything. Nothing had consequences.
  • Chapter 46 (p. 472)

• They’d made a plan, and so far everything was more or less going the way they’d hoped. The thought left Holden increasingly terrified.
  • Chapter 47 (p. 475)

• Holden yelled in frustration. The universe kept waiting until he was thoroughly beaten, then tossing him a nibble of hope only to yank it away again.
  • Chapter 50 (p. 509)

• “Well,” Holden said, his voice grim, “we have a major problem. We’re out of coffee.”
  “We’ve still got beer,” Amos said.
  “Yes,” Holden said. “But beer is not coffee. I’ve put in a request with the Behemoth, but I haven’t heard back, and I can’t see going into the vast and unknown void without coffee.”
  • Chapter 53 (pp. 529-530)

• She was not a political creature. She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk.
  • Epilogue (p. 538)

Cibola Burn (2014)

All page numbers from the hardcover American first edition published by Orbit Books ISBN 978-0-316-21762-0, 1st printing
Published in collaboration with Ty Franck under the pseudonym James S. A. Corey

• “At least he cares,” Elvi said. “I like him for that.”
  “You like everyone,” Fayez teased. It’s your pathology.”
  “You don’t like anyone.”
  “That’s mine,” he said, grinning.
  • Chapter 2 (p. 23)

• Dead’s not good, but at least it’s simple.
  • Chapter 2 (p. 27)

• “Dammit,” Holden said after he’d killed the connection. “You ever get the sense that the universe is out to get you?”
  “Sometimes I get the sense that the universe is out to get you,” Amos said with a grin. “It’s fun to watch.”
  • Chapter 2 (p. 42)

• You mean you want me to make it look like you’re doing something while you figure out what to do.
  • Chapter 2 (p. 47)

• Some secrets stayed secrets because nobody knew them. Some because nobody told.
  • Chapter 5 (p. 55)

• Everything was an artifact of its function. That’s what made evolution so gorgeous.
  • Chapter 6 (p. 64)

• “We’re the ones who followed the rules here. We came with science teams and a hard dome. We hired them to build our landing platform, and they killed us. We’re the good guys here.”
  “And the moral high ground is a lovely place,” Marwick said, as if he were agreeing. “It won’t stop a missile, though.”
  • Chapter 15 (p. 156)

• The engineers groaned and shook their heads. Legal arguments were another phrase for bullshit to them.
  • Chapter 19 (p. 193)

• Human brains needed an answer, even if they had to make up something they knew was bullshit.
  • Chapter 22 (p. 219)

• You can order the sun to come up if you time it right.
  • Chapter 23 (p. 237)

• I hate that it breaks down that way. Your side and mine. One of my teachers back in school always used to say that contagion was the one absolute proof of community. People could pretend there weren’t drug users and prostitutes and unvaccinated children all they wanted, but when the plague came through, all that mattered was who was actually breathing your air.
  • Chapter 27 (p. 277)

• “Still. Maybe some good can come out of it.”
  “I admire your psychotic optimism.”
  • Chapter 30 (p. 309)

• It was less fun being the chosen one and prophet when the gods were violent and capricious and their spokesman was insane and powerless.
  • Chapter 34 (p. 345)

• There were a lot of holes in that logic that he carefully avoided thinking about.
  • Chapter 39 (p. 400)

• “Right,” Holden said. “No coffee. This is a terrible, terrible planet.”
  • Chapter 41 (p. 421)

• From where he was, the fear had stopped being an emotion and turned into an environment.
  • Chapter 45 (p. 458)

• There was no point to the attack except spite and the kind of violence that passed for meaning in the face of despair.
  • Chapter 45 (p. 464)

• They fought and worked and devised intricate plans to buy more time. Basia had no doubt that they’d work just as hard to keep each other alive for even a few more minutes. It wasn’t something he’d ever had to think about before. But it did seem to be a microcosm of everything in life. No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work.
  • Chapter 47 (p. 481)

• “Is that you?” Holden asked in what he was pretty sure was the new universal winner for stupid questions.
  • Chapter 48 (p. 488)

• But, like so many things in life, when you come to the spot where you’re supposed to do the rituals, you do them.
  • Chapter 48 (p. 491)

• “They say revenge is empty.”
  “This is my first try at it,” Holden said. “Forgive me if my opinions on it are fairly unformed.”
  • Chapter 53 (p. 537)

• She isn’t stupid, but she’s learning to fake it.
  • Epilogue (p. 575)

• That was the danger of being old and a politician. Habits outlived the situations that created them. Policies remained in place after the situations that inspired them had changed. The calculus of all human power was changing, and the models she used to make sense of it shifted with them, and she had to keep reminding herself that the past was a different place. She didn’t live there anymore.
  • Epilogue (p. 576)

The Churn (2014)

Published in collaboration with Ty Franck under the pseudonym James S. A. Corey

Quotes from the e-book edition

• She understood on a deep, animal level that sex was like music or language. It could express anything. Love, yes. Or anger, or bitterness, or despair. It could be a way to grieve or a way to take revenge. It could be a weapon or a nightmare or a solace. Sex was meaningless, and so it could mean anything.

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

• The several unexamined assumptions in the argument remained unexamined.

• “The second I saw those bastards coming down the street, I knew it was over for me. I’m dead. It’s just a matter of time is all.”
  “That’s always true,” Lydia said, her mind taken with other matters. “For everyone.”

Nemesis Games (2015)

All page numbers from the hardcover American first edition published by Orbit Books ISBN 978-0-316-21758-3, 1st printing
Published in collaboration with Ty Franck under the pseudonym James S. A. Corey

• “You familiar with the land rush in North America?”
  “Yeah,” Holden said, then took a sip of Fred’s coffee. It was delicious. Earth grown, and rich. The privileges of rank. “I got your covered wagon reference. I grew up in Montana, you know. That frontier shit is still the story the people there tell about themselves.”
  “So you know that the mythology of manifest destiny hides a lot of tragedy. Many of those covered wagons never made it. And more than a few of the people who did wound up as cheap labor for the railroads, mines, and rich farmers.”
  Holden drank his coffee and watched the ship construction. “Not to mention all the people who were living there before the covered wagons showed up and gave everyone a nifty new plague.”
  • Chapter 1 (p. 14)

• Just once I’d like to be rewarded for my optimistic view of humanity.
  • Chapter 1 (p. 18)

• We’re still humans after all. Some percentage of us are always going to be assholes.
  • Chapter 1 (p. 20)

• Naomi couldn’t tell if she was more astounded by how much things had changed or how little.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 32)

• Some things stayed secrets even when you told them.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 33)

• She could remember the girl she used to be with fondness, but it wasn’t a youth she cared to recapture.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 34)

• “So you’re trying to get me prepared for one of my crew dying?”
  “Historically speaking, humans are pretty much at a hundred percent on that.”
  • Chapter 3 (p. 36)

• Like the roaches and the rats, ants had learned to live with their human neighbors without much trouble. When the concrete of human cities spread across the globe and half the animals on Earth were on endangered lists, no one had worried about the ants. They were doing fine, thanks, and spilled fast food was just as plentiful and delicious as dead forest animals had once been.
  Adapt or die.
  • Chapter 4 (p. 42)

• “You look old, Fred.”
  “I feel old. But it’s better than the alternative.”
  • Chapter 5 (p. 53)

• Holden couldn’t tell if she was melancholy or solving a complex engineering problem in her head. Those looks were confusingly similar.
  • Chapter 5 (p. 56)

• It was beautiful at this distance. The cities nothing but firefly twinkles on the dark side. Where the sun struck the Earth, almost nothing man had made was visible from the lunar orbit. The planet looked clean, unspoiled.
  It was a pretty lie.
  Seemed like a fact of the universe that the closer you got to anything, the worse it looked. Take the most beautiful person in the solar system, zoom in on them at the right magnification and they were an apocalyptic cratered landscape crawling with horrors. That’s what the Earth was. A shining jewel from space, up close a blasted landscape covered with mites living by devouring the dying.
  • Chapter 7 (p. 74)

• But under it there was a faint, not-unpleasant odor of rotting seaweed and salt. The ocean, just outside, seeped into everything. An olfactory reminder to everyone passing through the Ellis Island of the space age that Earth was absolutely unique to the human race. The birthplace of everything. The salt water flowing in everyone’s veins first pulled from the same oceans right outside the building. The seas had been around longer than humans, had helped create them, and then when they were all dead, it’d take their water back without a thought.
  That, at least, wasn’t a lie.
  • Chapter 7 (p. 76)

• Computers, it seemed, could be programmed to do almost anything but sense when someone was up to no good.
  • Chapter 7 (p. 76)

• “Long story, but the point is that 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.”
  “So what are you saying?”
  “I’m saying let’s go see if we can find some horses or zebras before we start a unicorn hunt.”
  • Chapter 8 (p. 86)

• You can tell you’ve found a really interesting question when nobody wants you to answer it.
  • Chapter 8 (p. 92)

• Secrecy is the potting soil in which all this conspiracy shit grows. Trust me. The roaches don’t like it when you start shining a light on them.
  • Chapter 13 (p. 140)

• Alex’s experience of real family—of blood relations—was more like having a lot of people who had all wound up on the same mailing list without knowing quite why they signed up for it.
  • Chapter 15 (p. 163)

• Realizing you’ve got shit on your fingers is the first step toward washing your hands.
  • Chapter 20 (p. 209)

• You think you know what I am, she thought, but all you’ve got is stories.
  • Chapter 21 (p. 222)

• In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. The accusation of tyranny, however well-founded in fact, is dismissed unless it is delivered in the manner that power recognizes as powerful.
  • Chapter 21 (p. 223)

• Something in the back of her head shifted. The serpent of learned helplessness long asleep starting to wake. She pretended it wasn’t there, in hopes that if she denied it enough, it wouldn’t exist.
  • Chapter 21 (p. 225)

• “Sometimes you don’t get redeemed,” she said, and here voice made it clear she’d thought about the question. Tired and strong at the same time. “Not every stain comes out. Sometimes you do something bad enough that you carry the consequences for the rest of your life and take the regrets to the grave. That’s your happy ending.”
  • Chapter 22 (p. 233)

• “You think we’re going to die?”
  “Yup.”
  “Of this?”
  “Maybe.”
  • Chapter 24 (p. 252)

• “You are a special flower.”
  “Well, sure. Just not used to anybody appreciating it.”
  • Chapter 24 (p. 255)

• The only right you have with anyone in life is the right to walk away.
  • Chapter 25 (p. 270)

• “I never thought I’d feel wind again. I never thought I’d be outside. It’s so beautiful.”
  Amos glanced around the ruins and shrugged. “That’s got a lot to do with context, I guess.”
  • Chapter 26 (p. 280)

• His head hurt. His back hurt. He couldn’t feel his legs. It was all distressing until his mind came back enough for him to realize it meant he hadn’t died.
  • Chapter 27 (p. 282)

• The aliens that sent the protomolecule hadn’t needed to destroy humanity. They’d given humans the opportunity to destroy themselves, and as a species, they’d leaped on it.
  • Chapter 27 (pp. 291-292)

• History’s made of surprises that seem obvious in retrospect.
  • Chapter 28 (p. 296)

• That sounds like post hoc realpolitik rationalizing bullshit.
  • Chapter 28 (p. 298)

• “I try to do the right thing, Holden. But there are times when it’s not obvious what that is.”
  “I agree with you,” Holden said. “Right up to the part where you tell me this is one of those times.”
  • Chapter 28 (p. 298)

• She knew intellectually that he was beautiful, the way the iridescent wings of a carrion fly would be.
  • Chapter 29 (p. 309)

• Militia motherfucker. NO TRESPASSING signs and everything. Took a potshot at me when I went to ask for some water. Kind of asshole that’s probably pissing himself with glee that the world went to shit and made his stashed guns and paranoia pay off.
  • Chapter 30 (p. 316)

• Thing about civilization, it’s what keeps people civil. You get rid of one, you can’t count on the other.
  • Chapter 30 (p. 316)

• Thing is, we’re humans. We’re tribal. More settled things are, the bigger your tribe is. All the people in your gang, or all the people in your country. All the ones on your planet. Then the churn comes, and the tribe gets small again.
  • Chapter 30 (p. 317)

• Amazing how much we’ve managed to do, considering how we’re doing it all with jumped-up social primates and evolutionary behaviors from the Pleistocene.
  • Chapter 31 (p. 325)

• She wanted to care, but she didn’t. She didn’t have time.
  • Chapter 32 (p. 338)

• “Panicking people for no reason—”
  “Panicking at this point isn’t unreasonable,” Monica said. “And deciding for people what they should get to know so they do what you think they should do? That isn’t how the good guys act, and you know it. It’s paternalistic, it’s condescending, and it’s beneath you. Maybe not them, The political movers and shakers. But it’s beneath you.”
  • Chapter 33 (p. 350)

• There was no amount of double-checking that would ever prove that nothing had been missed.
  • Chapter 36 (p. 379)

• Bobbie sighed. “You know, a thousand of those stars out there are ours now. That’s like, what? Three ten-thousandths of a percent of our galaxy? That’s what we’re fighting over.”
  “You think?”
  “You don’t?”
  “Nah,” Alex said. “I figure we’re fighting over who gets the most meat from the hunt and first access to the water hole. Mating rights. Who believes in which gods. Who has the most money. The usual primate issues.”
  “Kids,” Bobbie said.
  “Kids?”
  “Yeah. Everyone wanting to make sure their kids have a better shot than they did. Or than everyone else’s kids. Something like that.”
  “Yeah, probably,” Alex said.
  • Chapter 37 (p. 384)

• “My own kind,” she said. “Let me tell you about my own kind. There are two sides in this, but they aren’t inner planets and outer ones. Belters and everyone else. It’s not like that. It’s the people who want more violence and the ones who want less. And no matter what other variable you sample out of, you’ll find some of both.”
  • Chapter 39 (p. 410)

• “See, that’s what civilization is,” he said. “Bunch of stories. That’s all.”
  “So what if it is?” Peaches said. “We’re really good at telling stories.”
  • Chapter 40 (pp. 417-418)

• “It’s good being young,” he said, “but some people wear it better than others.”
  • Chapter 42 (p. 432)

• He told himself that, but he was getting less and less persuasive. Not knowing was the worst thing. The second-worst thing as being chased by a bunch of top-of-the-line warships that really wanted to kill you.
  • Chapter 43 (p. 442)

• She grinned to herself. Safe. That sounded like a good plan. She should try that for a change.
  • Chapter 44 (p. 450)

• “Seriously?”
  “Yep.”
  “That’s a really stupid way to go through life.”
  “It’s how most people do.”
  “Then most people are really stupid.”
  • Chapter 45 (p. 460)

• He wasn’t a man who reined in his curiosity well.
  • Chapter 47 (p. 476)

• Sometimes when we make these distinctions, we’re really creating them more than describing anything that’s already there.
  • Chapter 48 (p. 488)

• “Hell no,” Jim said when they were alone in the suite. “Absolutely no. No fucking way, no. There have got to be a billion different ways to say no, and I’d still have to cycle through them a couple times to really express the depth of no on this one. Clarissa Mao? On the Roci? How is that anything but a massive load of let’s-not-do-that?”
  • Chapter 51 (p. 513)

• She felt like her soul was a handful of dice that were still rolling, and what came up would decide the shape that the rest of her life took.
  • Chapter 51 (p. 514)

• Things changed, and they didn’t change back. But sometimes they got better.
  • Chapter 51 (p. 519)

• Humanity was so flawed. Not just her, but everyone. Half the population was below average intelligence. Half below average dedication. Average adherence to duty. The cruel law of statistics. It was astounding that as a race they’d managed as much as they had.
  • Epilogue (p. 525)