Daniel Abraham

You can order the sun to come up if you time it right.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

“Still. Maybe some good can come out of it.”“I admire your psychotic optimism.”

— Daniel Abraham

It was less fun being the chosen one and prophet when the gods were violent and capricious and their spokesman was insane and powerless.

— Daniel Abraham

There were a lot of holes in that logic that he carefully avoided thinking about.

— Daniel Abraham

“Right,” Holden said. “No coffee. This is a terrible, terrible planet.”

— Daniel Abraham

From where he was, the fear had stopped being an emotion and turned into an environment.

— Daniel Abraham

There was no point to the attack except spite and the kind of violence that passed for meaning in the face of despair.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

“Is that you?” Holden asked in what he was pretty sure was the new universal winner for stupid questions.

— Daniel Abraham

But, like so many things in life, when you come to the spot where you’re supposed to do the rituals, you do them.

— Daniel Abraham

“They say revenge is empty.”“This is my first try at it,” Holden said. “Forgive me if my opinions on it are fairly unformed.”

— Daniel Abraham

She isn’t stupid, but she’s learning to fake it.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

We say that flowers return every spring, but that is a lie. It is true that the world is renewed. It is also true that that renewal comes at a price, for even if the flower grows from an ancient vine, the flowers of spring are themselves new to the world, untried and untested.

— Daniel Abraham

I was listening to Tim Powers talking and he said he didn't want his villains just defeated, he wanted them humiliated and destroyed. And I thought: 'I don't. I want my villains to be understood and forgiven.

— Daniel Abraham

Writers are a basically insecure bunch. We are convinced that everything we do sucks, all the time. It's something you have to fight. The best way to make sure that your writing will never be particularly good is to use it for something besides telling the story. And I think there's a real tension between sophistication and accessibility.

— Daniel Abraham

Say what you will about organized crime, at least it’s organized.

— Daniel Abraham

If Miller had ever been called upon to describe her, the phrase deceptive coloration would have figured in.

— Daniel Abraham

“Too many dots,” Miller said. “Not enough lines.”

— Daniel Abraham

The enlisted guys will be okay, but the officers get the sense of humor trained out of ’em.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

He couldn’t fix the cancer of war, couldn’t even slow down the spread, but at least he could admit it was happening.

— Daniel Abraham

She didn’t care. Not caring was how she got through the day.

— Daniel Abraham

“See, this is why I can’t ever be in command,” she said.“More I’m not suicidally irresponsible,” she replied.

— Daniel Abraham

The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending.

— Daniel Abraham

Never knew if you had any luck left unless you pushed it.

— Daniel Abraham

It’s the problem with politics. Your enemies are often your allies. And vice versa.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

“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.”

— Daniel Abraham

“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.

— Daniel Abraham

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?

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

Liquor doesn’t make you feel better. Just makes you not so worried about feeling bad.

— Daniel Abraham

“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?”“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.”

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

Miller was staring at him like an entomologist trying to figure out exactly where the pin went.

— Daniel Abraham

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. And how would having the stars change anything?

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

He cut the connection before she could answer. Long goodbyes weren’t anyone’s strong suit.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

The rich scent of well-balanced soil was like incense.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

Do not underestimate his capacity to fuck things up.

— Daniel Abraham

The intensity of your feelings isn’t evidence.

— Daniel Abraham

“I’m not a traitor,” Bobbie said to her reflection in the mirror. Mirror Bobbie looked unconvinced.

— Daniel Abraham

Familiarity might breed contempt, but Bobbie hadn’t much liked Soren right from the start.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

She’d stopped looking tired a while ago and had moved on to whatever tired turns into when it became a lifestyle.

— Daniel Abraham

“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.”

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

There was justice to be had.He just couldn’t afford it.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

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!

— Daniel Abraham

“No,” Avasarala said.“I’m sorry, did I seem to give a fuck that this is your ship? If I did, really, I was just being polite.”

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

“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.

— Daniel Abraham

“Why aren’t you doing that?”“Do you want the real reason, or my justification?”

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

If life transcends death, then I will seek for you there. If not, then there too.

— Daniel Abraham

That man’s asshole must be tight enough right now to bend space.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

I hope we don’t start shooting, but what I hope will happen and what actually happens are almost never the same.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

That’s not a government, it’s a rugby scrum with a currency.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

“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.

— Daniel Abraham

“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.”

— Daniel Abraham

What had been logical became dumb, and all it took was changing the context.

— Daniel Abraham

“Same here, Cap’n,” Amos said. “I got a lot of past in my past.”

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

That kind of attention changes people, and it don’t make them better.

— Daniel Abraham

No one can blather on like a holy man with a trapped audience. Well, maybe a politician.

— Daniel Abraham

Theological anthropology is a lot simpler when humans are the only ones with souls.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

If you’re aiming not to creep me the hell out, you need more practice.

— Daniel Abraham

“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.”

— Daniel Abraham

Her fantasies of it were so strong, they were like memories.

— Daniel Abraham

“Trashy people puke,” Tilly said. “Ladies are unwell.”

— Daniel Abraham

History is made up of people recovering from the last disaster.

— Daniel Abraham

“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.”

— Daniel Abraham

“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.”

— Daniel Abraham

Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.

— Daniel Abraham

If the UN wants to space her, I’ll push the damn button myself.

— Daniel Abraham

After a certain point, the past becomes irrelevant.

— Daniel Abraham

God might not care about financial standing, but He was the only one.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

He still wasn’t sure whether he believed it was true, even. But right now, it needed to be, and so it was.

— Daniel Abraham

I’ve been famous before. It’s not so great.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

There’s a difference between tragedy and evil, and I am that difference.

— Daniel Abraham

When what came next didn’t matter, anybody could do anything. Nothing had consequences.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

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.

— Daniel Abraham

“Well,” Holden said, his voice grim, “we have a major problem. We’re out of coffee.”“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.”

— Daniel Abraham

She was not a political creature. She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk.

— Daniel Abraham

“At least he cares,” Elvi said. “I like him for that.”“That’s mine,” he said, grinning.

— Daniel Abraham

Dead’s not good, but at least it’s simple.

— Daniel Abraham

“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.”

— Daniel Abraham

You mean you want me to make it look like you’re doing something while you figure out what to do.

— Daniel Abraham

Some secrets stayed secrets because nobody knew them. Some because nobody told.

— Daniel Abraham

Everything was an artifact of its function. That’s what made evolution so gorgeous.

— Daniel Abraham

“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.”

— Daniel Abraham

The engineers groaned and shook their heads. Legal arguments were another phrase for bullshit to them.

— Daniel Abraham

Human brains needed an answer, even if they had to make up something they knew was bullshit.

— Daniel Abraham