Daniel Abraham on Philosophy

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

"I mean, I’m all for forgiveness and bygones being bygones, but it’s easier to stomach that after the assholes are all dead."

"Everyone spies on everyone, Camina. Let’s not pretend to be outraged at water for being wet."

"She’d ended with I’ll do whatever I can, but you might have to make do with being avenged."

"Nothing degraded morale like the sense that the potential for excellence was being denied."

"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."

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

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

"“It’s good being young,” he said, “but some people wear it better than others."

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

"I’m not sure if dying free is as attractive when it stops being rhetorical."

"She was rejoicing and mourning at the same time. And also feeling the deep unease that came from the reminder that being familiar wasn’t the same as being understood."

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

"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."

"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."

"You’re young yet. I’m not. There’s this thing when you get older where you have to make a choice. Everyone does. You have to decide whether you care more about being your best self or your real one. If you’re more loyal to who you ought to be or who you really are."

"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."

"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."

"I don't find fantasy to be more or less suited to philosophical questions than any other genre, really. I think that the soul of fantasy—or second-world fantasy at least—is our problematic relationship with nostalgia. The impulse to return to a golden age seems to be pretty close to the bone, at least in western cultures, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's a human universal. For me, it's tied up with the experience of aging and the impulse to recapture youth. Epic fantasy, I think, takes its power from that. We create golden eras and either celebrate them or—more often—mourn their loss."