Daniel Abraham on Life

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

"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?"

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"The only right you have with anyone in life is the right to walk away."

"“All right,” Bobbie said. “New orders. Don’t die until I say so."

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

"It was a day with a lot of ways to die packed in it."

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"It was the single central argument that the universe had made to her through her whole life, and she was only now seeing it clearly: Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled. Anything else was just a postponement of the next round of violence."

"“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."

"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."

"Djuna had stopped letting him watch the local newsfeeds at breakfast on the weekends. Too many stories about bodies being found in unfortunate conditions. Too many missing people, too many espionage claims, too many reminders from the still-official security apparatus that Pinkwater was an unaffiliated corporate entity with no political litmus tests and only the safety and well-being of the citizens of Ganymede at heart. The sorts of things people said because they weren’t true."