Daniel Abraham: Trending quotes (page 4)

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

Daniel Abraham

Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 12 (p. 129)

Soul

“No one can blather on like a holy man with a trapped audience. Well, maybe a politician.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 12 (p. 128)

“That kind of attention changes people, and it don’t make them better.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 11 (p. 122)

Making love , People , Change

“There are no souls, Melba thought with a touch of pity. We are bags of meat with a little electricity running through them. No ghosts, no spirits, no souls. The only thing that survives is the story people tell about you. The only thing that matters is your name.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 11 (p. 121)

Soul , People

“Even with all that metal and ceramic crammed into the same little corner of space, even with the relatively tiny thousand klicks across what was the inner face of the Ring, the chances that he’d run into anything were trivial. There was a lot more nothing than something.”

Daniel Abraham

Prologue (p. 6)
Abaddon's Gate (2013)

Chance

“That’s not a government, it’s a rugby scrum with a currency.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 53 (p. 582)

“That night’s selection was called Windblown Grass. It didn’t exactly smell like grass to Holden, but it was nice. Just a hint of earthiness to it. Holden had a suspicion that all perfumes were named randomly, anyway.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 53 (p. 579)

Grass , Night

“There was a time, Prax knew, that the violence would have bothered him. Not the blood or bodies. He’d spent more than enough time doing dissections and even autonomous-limb vivisection to be able to wall off what he was seeing from any particular sense of visceral horror. But that it was something done in anger, that the men and women he’d just seen blown apart hadn’t donated their bodies or tissues, would have affected him once. The universe had taken that from him, and he couldn’t say now exactly when it had happened. Part of him was numb, and maybe it always would be. There was a feeling of loss in that, but it was intellectual.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 51 (p. 563)

Loss , Anger , Time , Universe

“The truth was her version wasn’t any more or less a fantasy than his. No one would know for sure until everyone knew for sure.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 47 (p. 510)

Truth

“If life transcends death, then I will seek for you there. If not, then there too.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 45 (p. 494)

Life , Death

“The holy fool who’d dragged the solar system into war and seemed utterly blind to the damage he caused. An idealist. The most dangerous kind of man there was.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 45 (p. 493)

War , Fools

“Desperate psychotic people do desperate psychotic things when they’re exposed. I refuse to grant them immunity from exposure out of fear of their reaction. When you do, the desperate psychos wind up in charge.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 42 (p. 463)

Fear , People

“The proportions, the black hair, the dark eyes, everything was the same. Only, giant. It short-circuited his neural wiring. The lizard living at the back of his brain kept jumping back and forth between Mate with it! and Flee from it!”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 42 (p. 459)

“They were willing to risk a hole in the ship emptying out half the ship’s air rather than let her up to the bridge. It was sort of gratifying to be scarier than sudden decompression.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 38 (p. 420)

Relation ships

“It took his breath away. The elegance and functionality of the structure lay out before him, as beautiful and simple and effective as a leaf or a root cluster. To have something so much like the fruits of evolution, but designed by human minds, was awe-inspiring. It was the pinnacle of what creativity meant, the impossible made real.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 31 (p. 344)

Beauty

“She’d stopped looking tired a while ago and had moved on to whatever tired turns into when it became a lifestyle.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 30 (p. 334)

“Owning your own racing ship wasn’t even wealth. It was like speciation. It was conspicuous consumption befitting ancient Earth royalty, a pharaoh’s pyramid with a reaction drive.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 30 (p. 330)

Wealth , Relation ships

“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.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 30 (pp. 329-330)

Girl , Imagination , Wealth , Time

“The intensity of your feelings isn’t evidence.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 22 (p. 243)

Feeling

“Do not underestimate his capacity to fuck things up.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 9 (p. 100)