Daniel Abraham on Time

"Bobbie felt the pressure of time slipping away like she was watching a door close, with her on the wrong side of it."

"Our backup plan is everyone does this right the first time so we don’t need a backup plan. Understood?"

"It had seemed like a kind of magnanimity at the time. It looked more like necessity now."

"This was the problem with thousand-year Reichs. They came and they went like fireflies."

"Time healed all wounds, but it didn’t erase the scars so much as decorate them."

"Things changed, and they didn’t change back. But sometimes they got better."

"There had to have been a moment when this had become the new normal."

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

"Her shoulders were tight. She felt like they were in the moment between throwing dice and seeing what numbers had come up. The gambler’s high. She didn’t like how much she liked it."

"She wanted to care, but she didn’t. She didn’t have time."

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

"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."

"Elvi spent the hours before dawn watching the feeds. As soon as the violence ended, even before the wounded and the dead were sorted, the stories began taking shape. The differences between the state newsfeeds and the security reports Elvi saw in the aftermath made it sound like there had been two different battles."

"How many millions of times had people had this exact conversation before? How many wars had put two people together for a moment and then washed them apart? There had to be a tradition of it. A secret history of vulnerability and want and all the things that sex promised and only occasionally delivered. They were just one more couple among all the countless others. It only hurt this time because it was them."

"The imperial view, a history professor at the Naval Academy once said, is the long view. Individuals build empires because they want their names to echo through time. They build massive constructs of stone and steel so that their descendants will remember the people who created the world that they only live in. There were buildings on Earth that were thousands of years old, sometimes the only remaining evidence of empires that thought they would last forever. Hubris, the professor had called it. When people build, they are trying to make an aspiration physical. When they die, their intentions are buried with them. All that’s left is the building."