“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.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“What kind of half-assed apocalypse are they running down there?” Amos said. “Give ’em a break. It’s their first.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Stars are better off without us.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Too many dots," Miller said. "Not enough lines.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“He hadn’t been aware he’d felt wrong until he suddenly felt right again.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“First off, get your shit together. Panic doesn’t help. It never helps. Deep breaths, figure this out, make the right moves. Fear is the mind-killer. Ha. Geek.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“The massive radiation exposure had failed to give him superpowers.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“His parents had raised him to believe that sex was something you did in private not because it was embarrassing, but because it was intimate.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“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.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Liquor doesn’t make you feel better. Just makes you not so worried about feeling bad.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Miller was staring at him like an entomologist trying to figure out exactly where the pin went.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“A hundred and fifty years before, when the parochial disagreements between Earth and Mars had been on the verge of war, the Belt had been a far horizon of tremendous mineral wealth beyond viable economic reach, and the outer planets had been beyond even the most unrealistic corporate dream. Then Solomon Epstein had built his little modified fusion drive, popped it on the back of his three-man yacht, and turned it on. With a good scope, you could still see his ship going at a marginal percentage of the speed of light, heading out into the big empty. The best, longest funeral in the history of mankind. Fortunately, he’d left the plans on his home computer. The Epstein Drive hadn’t given humanity the stars, but it had delivered the planets.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Posthuman. It was a word that came up in the media every five or six years, and it meant different things every time. Neural regrowth hormone? Posthuman. Sex robots with inbuilt pseudo intelligence? Posthuman. Self-optimizing network routing? Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he’d ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Everyone too busy trying to survive to spend any time creating something new.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“People always whispered when they were hiding. Wrapped in a space suit and surrounded by vacuum, Gomez could have been lighting fireworks inside his armor and no one would have heard it, but he whispered.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“I know it's none of my business, but I really wouldn't let her put you off. So you don't understand sex and love and women. Just means you were born with a cock. And this girl? Naomi? She seems like she's worth putting a little effort into it. You know?"
"Yeah," Holden said. Then: "Can we never talk about that again?"
"Sure.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“GOODY. MY SPLEEN IS COLLAPSING. HURRY UP.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“I don’t believe war ever does. It’s a madness that’s in our nature. Sometimes it recurs; sometimes it subsides.” “Sounds like a disease.” “The herpes simplex of the species?”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Stupid. Shortsighted. A man born with a sense for raw opportunity where his soul should have been. Miller’s”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“The pachinko machines lit them blue and green and shrieked in artificial delight.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“The abyss above him shone with unflickering stars. One of the dots of light was Earth. He didn’t know which one.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Fish and company start to smell after three days.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Tachi’s galley had a full kitchen and a table with room for twelve. It also had a full-size coffeepot that could brew forty cups of coffee in less than five minutes whether the ship was in zero g or under a five-g burn. Holden said a silent prayer of thanks for bloated military budgets and pressed the brew button. He had to restrain himself from stroking the stainless steel cover while it made gentle percolating noises.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“He’d seen unequivocally that the chaos he’d dedicated his life to holding at bay was stronger and wider and more powerful than he would ever be. No compromise he could make would be enough. His death-self was unfolding in him, and the dark blooming took no effort. It was a relief, a relaxation, a long, slow exhale after decades of holding it in.
He was in ruins, but it was okay, because he was dying.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Anyone can kill a planet from orbit,” Holden replied. “You don’t even need bombs. Just push anvils out the airlock. That thing out there could kill… Shit. Anything.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“There were two sides fighting—that was true enough—but they weren’t the inner planets versus the Belters. They were the people who thought it was a good idea to kill people who looked or acted differently against the people who didn’t.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Say what you will about organized crime, at least it’s organized.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Holden had once dated a Buddhist who said that death was merely a different state of being, and people only feared the unknown that lay behind that transition. Death without warning was preferable, as it removed all fear.
He felt he now had the counterargument.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Living on the surface of a planet, mass sucking at every bone and muscle, and nothing but gravity to keep your air close, seemed like a fast path to crazy.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Rebecca Byers, the comm officer on duty, could have been bred from a shark and a hatchet. Black eyes, sharp features, lips so thin they might as well not have existed. The story on board was that she’d taken the job to escape prosecution for killing an ex-husband. Holden liked her.”
― quote from Leviathan Wakes
“Three men came in. They wore ragged jeans, tight T-shirts, and work boots. And they sat at one of Grace's tables.
Noah was up and off his bar stool in a heartbeat. Ben silently wondered if he should be paying Noah a bouncer's salary, considering how much time he spent making certain Grace's work environment stayed pleasant. Noah didn't say anything to the men, but he did stop Grace, tip up her chin, and give her a lingering kiss right in the middle of the floor. Grace got so flustered, she nearly dropped her tray.
Noah released her, gave the men a long look, and positioned himself at an empty table—facing them.
Ben had to turn away so no one would see him laughing. If he ever got that smitten with a woman, he hoped someone would shoot him to put him out of his misery.”
― Lori Foster, quote from Too Much Temptation
“The unreal is the illogical. And this age seems to have a capacity for surpassing even the acme of illogicality, of anti-logicality: it is as if the monstrous reality of the war had blotted out the reality of the world. Fantasy has become logical reality, but reality evolves the most a-logical phantasmagoria. An age that is softer and more cowardly than any preceding age suffocates in waves of blood and poison-gas; nations of bank clerks and profiteers hurl themselves upon barbed wire; a well-organized humanitarianism avails to hinder nothing, but calls itself the Red Cross and prepares artificial limbs for the victims; towns starve and coin money out of their own hunger; spectacled school-teachers lead storm-troops; city dwellers live in caves; factory hands and other civilians crawl out on their artificial limbs once more to the making of profits. Amid a blurring of all forms, in a twilight of apathetic uncertainty brooding over a ghostly world, man like a lost child gropes his way by the help of a small frail thread of logic through a dream landscape that he calls reality and that is nothing but a nightmare to him.
The melodramatic revulsion which characterizes this age as insane, the melodramatic enthusiasm which calls it great, are both justified by the swollen incomprehensibility and illogicality of the events that apparently make up its reality. Apparently! For insane or great are terms that can never be applied to an age, but only to an individual destiny. Our individual destinies, however, are as normal as they ever were. Our common destiny is the sum of our single lives, and each of these single lives is developing quite normally, in accordance, as it were, with its private logicality. We feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives. Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?”
― Hermann Broch, quote from The Sleepwalkers
“Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living . What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, quote from God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism
“For instance, have you heard of Rupert Sheldrake’s work with dogs? He puts a time-recording camera on both the dog at home and the human companion at work. He has discovered that even if people come home from work at a different time each day, at the moment the person leaves work, the dog at home heads for the door. “Even mainstream scientists are stumbling all over this biocommunication phenomenon. It seems impossible, given the sophistication of modern instrumentation, for us to keep missing this fundamental attunement of living things. Only for so long are we going to be able to pretend it’s the result of ‘loose wires.’ We cannot forever deny that which is so clearly there.”
― Derrick Jensen, quote from A Language Older Than Words
“She glared at him through tear-filled eyes. “You talk of your pain? You cannot even begin to understand the sacrifice I have made. I gave away a piece of myself, my soul! But I did it out of love, never think otherwise. I made the choice to live my life without her because I knew in my heart she would be better off without me and I could not bear to know that a life created out of such perfect love would be forced to live with the ugly truth of her birth. I thought,” she sobbed, breaking down before him. “I thought…I did the right thing.”
― Charlotte Featherstone, quote from Addicted
High Fidelity
The Chosen
Daughter of Smoke &...
The Plague
Matched
The Way of KingsBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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