Paolo Bacigalupi

A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and again. She kept walking, waiting for the bullet.

Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.

Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.

Jesus walked on water, so maybe he makes aquifers, too.

Family. It was just a word_Could see its letters all strung together. But it was a symbol, too. And people thought they knew what it meant_It was a thing everyone had an opinion about__hat it was all you had when you didn__ have anything else, that family was there, that blood was thicker than water, whatever. But when Nailer thought about it, most of these words and ideas just seemed like good excuses for people to behave badly and get away with it. Family wasn__ more reliable than marriages or friendships_maybe less_The blood bond was nothing. It was the people that mattered. If they covered your back, and you covered theirs, then maybe that was worth calling family.

Belief._ He snorted. __ could kiss a thousand crosses. Fucking belief.

Believing is for Santa Claus, right? It's for Tooth Fairies. It's for your boyfriend when he says he's never met anyone like you and wants to feel you up. That's believing. It's for little kids. Belief. You believe in God?

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

I'm a chess piece. A pawn,' she said. 'I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.

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.

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.

Hell, we__e all bullet bait sooner or later. Doubt it makes much difference. You make it to sixteen, you__e a goddamn legend.

Mahlia_ understood Doctor Mahfouz and his blind rush into the village. He wasn__ trying to change them. He wasn__ trying to save anyone. He was just trying to not be part of the sickness. Mahlia had thought he was stupid for walking straight into death, but now, as she lay against the pillar, she saw it differently. She thought she__ been surviving. She thought that she__ been fighting for herself. But all she__ done was create more killing, and in the end it had all led to this moment, where they bargained with a demon _ not for their lives, but for their souls_ (p. 403)

Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you__ 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.

You couldn__ live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.

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

I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works.