Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes

We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.

But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.

You couldn’t live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.

Hell, we’re all bullet bait sooner or later. Doubt it makes much difference. You make it to sixteen, you’re a goddamn legend.

Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you’d seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some less. But everybody had it.

Her face was smeared with mud and blood and ash. Just another bit of debris in the wreckage of war.

Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in his crèche, learning to respect but never yield to. Pain was simply a message, telling him which limbs he could still use to slaughter his enemies, how far he could still run, and what his chances were in the next battle.

The problem with keeping money in a bank is that in the blink of a tiger's eye it will turn on you: what's yours becomes theirs, what was your sweat and labour and sold off portions of a lifetime becomes a stranger's.