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Daniel Abraham Quotes
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Daniel James Abraham , pen names M. L. N. Hanover and James S. A. Corey, is an American novelist, comic book writer, screenwriter, and television producer. He is best known as the author of The Long Price Quartet and The Dagger and the Coin fantasy series, and with Ty Franck, as the co-author of The Expanse series of science fiction novels, written under the joint pseudonym James S. A. Corey. The series has been adapted into the television series The Expanse , with both Abraham and Franck serving as writers and producers on the show.

Under the pseudonym M. L. N. Hanover, Abraham is the author of the Black Sun's Daughter urban fantasy series. With Franck, he wrote the Star Wars novel Honor Among Thieves , again as James S. A. Corey. Abraham collaborated with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois to write the science fiction novel Hunter's Run . A frequent collaborator of Martin, Abraham has adapted several of Martin's novels into comic books and graphic novels, such as A Game of Thrones: The Graphic Novel, and has contributed to Martin's Wild Cards universe.

His short stories have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, and have been collected in Leviathan Wept and Other Stories . Leviathan Wakes, book one of The Expanse, was nominated for the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the 2012 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. His novelette "Flat Diane" was nominated for the Nebula Award. His novelette "The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics" was nominated for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award. Abraham is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop 1998.



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✵ 14. November 1969
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Daniel Abraham: 141 quotes2 likes

Daniel Abraham Quotes

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

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

Daniel Abraham

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

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

Daniel Abraham

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

“I’ve been through a lot of hearings about one damn thing and another. Most of the time they’re exercises in ass covering. If the unvarnished truth ever came out at one, it would be because someone screwed up.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 9 (pp. 93-94)

“The rich scent of well-balanced soil was like incense.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 7 (p. 76)

“The mirror plummeting toward the surface of Ganymede—toward his greenhouse, his soybeans, his life’s work—hadn’t chosen anything. It was a victim of cause and effect, the same as everything else.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 3 (p. 26)

“Humanity was so flawed. Not just her, but everyone. Half the population was below average intelligence. Half below average dedication. Average adherence to duty. The cruel law of statistics. It was astounding that as a race they’d managed as much as they had.”

Daniel Abraham

Epilogue (p. 525)
Nemesis Games (2015)

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

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 51 (p. 519)

“Sometimes when we make these distinctions, we’re really creating them more than describing anything that’s already there.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 48 (p. 488)

“He wasn’t a man who reined in his curiosity well.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 47 (p. 476)

“There was no amount of double-checking that would ever prove that nothing had been missed.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 36 (p. 379)

“Amazing how much we’ve managed to do, considering how we’re doing it all with jumped-up social primates and evolutionary behaviors from the Pleistocene.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 31 (p. 325)

“I try to do the right thing, Holden. But there are times when it’s not obvious what that is.”

Daniel Abraham

“I agree with you,” Holden said. “Right up to the part where you tell me this is one of those times.”
Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 28 (p. 298)

“That sounds like post hoc realpolitik rationalizing bullshit.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 28 (p. 298)

“History’s made of surprises that seem obvious in retrospect.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 28 (p. 296)

“The aliens that sent the protomolecule hadn’t needed to destroy humanity. They’d given humans the opportunity to destroy themselves, and as a species, they’d leaped on it.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 27 (pp. 291-292)

“I never thought I’d feel wind again. I never thought I’d be outside. It’s so beautiful.”

Daniel Abraham

Amos glanced around the ruins and shrugged. “That’s got a lot to do with context, I guess.”
Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 26 (p. 280)

“You are a special flower.”

Daniel Abraham

“Well, sure. Just not used to anybody appreciating it.”
Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 24 (p. 255)

“You think we’re going to die?”
“Yup.”
“Of this?”

Daniel Abraham

“Maybe.”
Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 24 (p. 252)

“In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. The accusation of tyranny, however well-founded in fact, is dismissed unless it is delivered in the manner that power recognizes as powerful.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 21 (p. 223)

“Realizing you’ve got shit on your fingers is the first step toward washing your hands.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 20 (p. 209)

“Secrecy is the potting soil in which all this conspiracy shit grows. Trust me. The roaches don’t like it when you start shining a light on them.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 13 (p. 140)

“Long story, but the point is that if you hear hoofbeats in the distance, your first guess is that they’re horses, not zebras. And you’re hearing hoofbeats and jumping straight to unicorns.”
“So what are you saying?”

Daniel Abraham

“I’m saying let’s go see if we can find some horses or zebras before we start a unicorn hunt.”
Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 8 (p. 86)

“Like the roaches and the rats, ants had learned to live with their human neighbors without much trouble. When the concrete of human cities spread across the globe and half the animals on Earth were on endangered lists, no one had worried about the ants. They were doing fine, thanks, and spilled fast food was just as plentiful and delicious as dead forest animals had once been.
Adapt or die.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 4 (p. 42)

“So you’re trying to get me prepared for one of my crew dying?”

Daniel Abraham

“Historically speaking, humans are pretty much at a hundred percent on that.”
Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 3 (p. 36)

“Some things stayed secrets even when you told them.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 3 (p. 33)

“We’re still humans after all. Some percentage of us are always going to be assholes.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 1 (p. 20)

“She felt like her soul was a handful of dice that were still rolling, and what came up would decide the shape that the rest of her life took.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 51 (p. 514)

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

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 32 (p. 338)

“She knew intellectually that he was beautiful, the way the iridescent wings of a carrion fly would be.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 29 (p. 309)

“The only right you have with anyone in life is the right to walk away.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 25 (p. 270)

“You can tell you’ve found a really interesting question when nobody wants you to answer it.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 8 (p. 92)

“Computers, it seemed, could be programmed to do almost anything but sense when someone was up to no good.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 7 (p. 76)

“You think you know what I am, she thought, but all you’ve got is stories.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 21 (p. 222)