Daniel Abraham on Knowledge

"“Emily,” Drummer said, “do you know the one thing I am absolutely sure won’t fix any of our problems? Another committee."

"I’m going to go obsessively run diagnostics on systems I know are solid so I can feel like I have control of something."

"History itself was a massive n=1 study, irreproducible. It was what made it so difficult to learn from."

"She knew intellectually that he was beautiful, the way the iridescent wings of a carrion fly would be."

"No one asked after Dr. Cortázar. That, Teresa had come to understand, was one of the unwritten rules. When someone disappears, don’t ask why."

"The universe wasn’t just stranger than you knew, it was stranger than you could know."

"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."

"Alex worried about that. Jillian was mean as a snake. When he’d told Bobbie that, she’d responded, I just make sure she never runs out of mice. He still didn’t know quite what that meant."

"He wasn’t a man who reined in his curiosity well."

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

"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."

"“When we get out,” she said. “Not if. When. We’re going to need a plan. If every ship just bolts off on its own, we’ll lose contact. They shouldn’t know where we went, but we should. At the very least, we should have a record of who went where. This every-man-for-himself-and-God-against-all shit’s romantic, but we have to plan for something past just this."