Daniel Abraham: Likeness

“He probed himself like a doctor searching for inflammation. Did it hurt here? Did he feel the loss there?
He didn’t. There was only a sense of relief so profound it approached giddiness.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 22 (p. 226)

Feeling , Search , Sense , Loss

“If things got out of hand, it would mean six or seven million dead people and the end of everything Miller had ever known.
Odd that it should feel almost like relief.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 16 (p. 164)

People , Feeling , Dead

“And now they were making music from the screams of the dying. Of the dead. The were dancing to it in the low-rent clubs. What it must be like, Miller thought, to be young and soulless.
But no. That wasn’t fair. Diogo was a good kid. He was just naive. The universe would take care of that, given a little time.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 44 (p. 445)

Music , Universe , Time , Dance

“He considered recording it. His suit would be able to make a simple visual file and stream the data out in real time. But no. This was his moment. His and Julia’s. The rest of humanity could guess what it had been like if they cared.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 48 (p. 488)

Time

“Miller was staring at him like an entomologist trying to figure out exactly where the pin went.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 45 (p. 457)

““See, this is why I can’t ever be in command,” she said.
“Don’t like making tough calls with incomplete information?”
“More I’m not suicidally irresponsible,” she replied.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 17 (pp. 178-179)

Suicide

“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

“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 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

“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

“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

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

Daniel Abraham

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

“That sounds like post hoc realpolitik rationalizing bullshit.”

Daniel Abraham

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

“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)

Light

“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

“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)

Soul , Life

“Alex’s experience of real family—of blood relations—was more like having a lot of people who had all wound up on the same mailing list without knowing quite why they signed up for it.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 15 (p. 163)

Family , People , Relation ships

“Just once I’d like to be rewarded for my optimistic view of humanity.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 1 (p. 18)

“I’m going to go obsessively run diagnostics on systems I know are solid so I can feel like I have control of something.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: The Expanse, Tiamat's Wrath (2019), Chapter 30 (p. 319)

Feeling

“Evolution was a paste-and-baling-wire process that came up with half-assed solutions like pushing teeth through babies’ gums and menstruation. Survival of the fittest was a technical term that covered a lot more close-enough-is-close-enough than actual design.”

Daniel Abraham

Source: The Expanse, Tiamat's Wrath (2019), Chapter 29 (p. 309)

Past , Baby