Home > Work > Abaddon's Gate (The Expanse, #3)
1 " Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito. So here the monkeys were, poking the shiny box and making guesses about what it did. "
― James S.A. Corey , Abaddon's Gate (The Expanse, #3)
2 " His words were full of hope and threat. Like the stars. "
3 " Partners,” she said, and fired two rounds into his head. "
4 " Tilly screamed. Anna’s shocked brain only registered annoyance at the sound. Really, when had someone screaming ever solved a problem? She recognized her fixation on this irritation as her own way of avoiding the horror in front of her, but only in a distant and dreamy sort of way. "
5 " Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she'll be haunted by what might be behind it. "
6 " They loved scenes of righteous Godly vengeance on sinful mankind. They loved to show God’s chosen people safe from harm, watching with happy faces as they were proved right to the world. But they never showed the aftermath. They never showed weeping humans, crushed and dying in pools of their own fluids. Young men smashed into piles of red flesh. A young woman cut in half because she was passing through a hatchway when catastrophe hit. This was Armageddon. This is what it looked like. Blood and torn flesh and cries for help. "
7 " Nothing wrong with a little optimism, long as it doesn’t set policy.... "
8 " This was especially true in some millennialist sects that filled their literature with paintings of Armageddon. Pictures of terrified people running away from some formless fiery doom that burned their world down behind them, while smug worshipers—of the correct religion, of course—watched from safety as God got with the smiting. "
9 " He'd turned away from a life on basic to live in the stars, or if not the stars, at least the rocks that floated free in the night sky. "
10 " For a moment, his pupils flickered blue, like there were tiny bathypelagic fish swimming in the deep trenches of his eyeballs. "
11 " The problem with living with miracles was that they made everything seem plausible. "
12 " Given their current circumstances, things would have to be very bad indeed for Tilly to think the situation had gotten worse. Sure, they were all trapped in orbit around an alien space station that periodically changed the rules of physics and had killed a bunch of them, but now they’d decided to start shooting each other too.Yes, very bad. "
13 " If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they'll still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another's fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She'd look up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She'd tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity that had put her there. "
14 " Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy. "
15 " No rest for the wicked, no peace for the good. "
16 " You're the predator right up until you're prey. "
17 " She was not a political creature. She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk. "
18 " Same here, Cap'n," Amos said. "I got a lot of past in my past. "
19 " No one can blather on like a holy man with a trapped audience. Well, maybe a politician. "
20 " They’d made a plan, and so far everything was more or less going the way they’d hoped. The thought left Holden increasingly terrified. "
