Daniel Abraham: Doing

“Governments exist on confidence. Not on liberty. Not on righteousness. Not on force. They exist because people believe that they do. Because they don’t ask questions.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: The Expanse, Tiamat's Wrath (2019), Chapter 34 (p. 357)

Self-confidence , Confidence , People , Question

“What I want to do is write something that I could read now (39 years old, married, raising a kid, 10 year IT career behind me, post 9-11, post-Bush, etc.) with the same joy I read the Belgariad when I was 16.”

Daniel Abraham

talking about http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/topic/30792-daniel-abraham/page__st__60 his epic fantasy series The Dagger and the Coin
Context: For the moment, it's called the Dagger and the Coin, but with any luck, that'll swap out for a better name. There are some things in the proposal that need to get smoothed out so that everyone's on board, but I think it'll happen.
It's a very different from the Long Price books. It looks and feels more like traditional epic fantasy -- quasi-Europe, ferinstance, and some dragons in the background, no 15-year gaps between books -- but the plot structure is packed with everything I think is cool. There are echoes I'm intentionally building in of from things as familiar as Firefly and The Count of Monte Cristo and as obscure as Tevis' Queen's Gambit and Reck-Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair. And the magic system is all about faith and deception, which will be tricky and fun both.
What I want to do is write something that I could read now (39 years old, married, raising a kid, 10 year IT career behind me, post 9-11, post-Bush, etc.) with the same joy I read the Belgariad when I was 16.

Reading , Joy

“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.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 36 (p. 363)

“But, like so many things in life, when you come to the spot where you’re supposed to do the rituals, you do them.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Cibola Burn (2014), Chapter 48 (p. 491)

Life

“When what came next didn’t matter, anybody could do anything. Nothing had consequences.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 46 (p. 472)

“Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas. It’s attractive because it’s simple, it’s direct, it’s almost always available as an option. When you can’t think of a good rebuttal for your opponent’s argument, you can always punch them in the face.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 44 (p. 444)

Idea , Thinking , People

“We keep acting without thinking and you think the solution is to do it one more time. You have allied yourself with stupid, violent men, and you are trying to convince yourself that being stupid and violent will work. That makes you stupid too. I will never help you. I’ll fight you now.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 39 (p. 404)

Time , Help , Thinking , Stupidity

“I’m getting a medal for falling into a pressure hatch, sacrificing an arm and a leg to keep seven sailors from being trapped in a compromised part of the ship. I was unconscious at the time, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they’d never do if they were really thinking about it.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Abaddon's Gate (2013), Chapter 32 (p. 338)

Time , People , Thinking , Relation ships

“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

“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

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

Daniel Abraham

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

“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)

Behavior

“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)

Time

“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)

Animals , Learning , Dead , Food

“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)

Sense

“Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: The Expanse, Tiamat's Wrath (2019), Chapter 21 (p. 215)