Quotes from Leviathan Wakes

“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

Video

Popular quotes

“So much in life came down to timing.”
― Kate Morton, quote from The Forgotten Garden

“Lorenzo il Magnifico, the Plato Four, the humanists had taught him that man was the center of the universe; and this was never more demonstrable that when he stood looking upward and found himself, a lone individual, serving as the central pole holding up the tarpaulin of sun and clouds, moon and stars, knowing that, lone or abandoned as he might feel, without his support the heavens would fall.”
― Irving Stone, quote from The Agony and the Ecstasy

“You haven't been smiling much. I missed it, so I decided to reward you for doing it." "Reward me?" I laughed. "God, only you would think kissing someone is a reward." "You know it is. My lips change lives, baby.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, quote from Opal

“I jump up: it would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns: "I have to fi. . . I ex. . . Dead . . . M. de Roll is dead . . . I am not ... I ex. . ." It goes, it goes . . . and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I. The body lives by itself once it has begun. But though I am the one who continues it, unrolls it. I exist. How serpentine is this feeling of existing, I unwind it, slowly. ... If I could keep myself from thinking! I try, and succeed: my head seems to fill with smoke . . . and then it starts again: "Smoke . . . not to think . . . don't want to think ... I think I don't want to think. I mustn't think that I don't want to think. Because that's still a thought." Will there never be an end to it?
My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think . . . and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment, it's frightful, if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence. Thoughts are born at the back of me, like sudden giddiness, I feel them being born behind my head ... if I yield, they're going to come round in front of me, between my eyes, and I always yield, the thought grows and grows and there it is, immense, filling me completely and renewing my existence.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, quote from Nausea

“I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, quote from The Two Towers

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters 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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.