“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
“I was born the son of a humble mechanic. A quantum mechanic.”
― Mark Oliver Everett, quote from Things The Grandchildren Should Know
“How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments. Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it. We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled. Time is their natural environment. Why do we sense that it is not ours?”
― Sheldon Vanauken, quote from A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy and Triumph
“Through a web of laws, regulations, and informal rules, all of which are powerfully reinforced by social stigma, they are confined to the margins of mainstream society and denied access to the mainstream economy.”
― Michelle Alexander, quote from The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
“You are not a man anymore. You are a soldier. Your comfort is of no importance and your life isn’t of much importance. Most of your orders will be unpleasant, but that’s not your business.They should’ve trained you for this, and not for flower-strewn streets. They should have built your soul with truth, not led along with lies.”
― John Steinbeck, quote from The Moon Is Down
“I'd rather be tried by 12 than carried by six.”
― Randy Alcorn, quote from Courageous
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A Pale View of HillsBookQuoters 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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