Persepolis Rising

Quotes

1. “You’re not picking a fight with the things that made the protomolecule. You’re picking a fight with whatever killed them. Orders of magnitude above the things that were orders of magnitude above us. You’ve got to know this is going to escalate if we keep using these technologies.”

   “We were always going to keep using these technologies. That was inevitable the moment we opened the gates,” Duarte said. “If you’ve studied any history at all, you know that. Never in human history have we discovered something useful and then chosen not to use it.”

   p. 548

2. 

   The fight for survival made everything either resilient or forgotten.

   p. 532

3. 

   He lifted the gun.

   “Wait!” Singh said. “Wait. Do you believe all that? About what killing me is supposed to achieve?”

   “I am an officer of the Laconian Empire, Governor Singh. I believe what I’m told to believe.”

   p. 520

4. 

   “‘The predictable limits of a conceptual framework,’” Bobbie said. A phrase from her classroom on Olympus Mons. “It’s always where to hit the enemy. Whoever they turn out to be. When I learned how to do things like this, we were thinking about Earthers and pirates.”

   Katria laughed. “When I taught myself how to do this, I was thinking of people like you. Strange how the wheel turns.”

   p. 455

5. 

   It was a day with a lot of ways to die packed in it.

   p. 482

6. 

   “It’s the reward of old age,” Avasarala said. “You live long enough, and you can watch everything you worked for become irrelevant.”

   “You’re not selling it,” Drummer said.

   “Fuck you, then. Die young. See if I care.”

   p. 529

7. 

   Her heart was pounding. Her muscles ached. She’d just killed two of the enemy. There would always be a little something—that tug on her humanity that came from doing violence. There was a satisfaction too. It didn’t mean she was a good woman or a bad one. It meant she was a Marine.

   p. 457

8. 

   Everything changed, and it went right on changing. A terrible thought when things were good, a comforting one now. Whatever happened, she could be certain that things wouldn’t stay the way they were now. And if she stayed smart and clever and lucky, she’d be able to affect how the next change came. Or take advantage of it.

   p. 539

9. 

   “You think he may be a triple agent?”

   “It wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened. The one thing you know about someone who’s willing to compromise his allies is that he’s willing to compromise his allies.”

   p. 472

10. 

    “The founding impulse of Freehold is sticking it to the government.”

    “Loses some of its shine after you get elected.”

    p. 537

11. 

    “All right,” Bobbie said. “New orders. Don’t die until I say so.”

    p. 503

12. 

    The hardest thing was to trust his own people to do their jobs well, but it was what he had to do. He wondered if the high consul suffered the same thing—knowing that all the critical action would be taken by others who were guided by his orders, but in conditions he could only guess at, and in places where his intervention, even if it were possible, could only muddy the waters. It was a subtle and terrible insight. The powerlessness of control.

    p. 476

13. 

    She had to remind herself that war was always this way. Had always been. Cities had been falling under siege since the time there were cities. Mortars had fallen on schools. Soldiers had stormed hospitals. Bombs had set churches and parks and children on fire. Homes had been lost before now.

    p. 281

14. 

    Patriotism was weird shit.

    p. 267

15. 

    “So why do you hate us? If you don’t mind my asking.”

    “You personally? I don’t. But this conquistador bullshit? It’s true I don’t think much of it.”

    Singh leaned back in his chair, cocked his head. “This is all a conversation about politics for you, then? It matters to you that much whose vision guides the government, no matter what that vision is?”

    “Not that academic,” Holden said. “I’ve spent a lot of years trying to get people to get along without anyone’s boot being on anyone’s neck. Your plan A is what I’ve spent a lifetime pushing against.”

    “Do you really think we’re so bad? Look at what we’ve done, how we’ve done it. We haven’t opened fire on a single ship that didn’t attack us first. In all of history, when has a conqueror been able to say that? We have embraced local rule. Any of the colony worlds that submits can make their own local government, keep their own local customs—”

    “Unless they conflict with your rules.”

    “Of course.”

    Holden sipped his coffee. “That’s the thing. The people you’re controlling don’t have a voice in how you control them. As long as everyone’s on the same page, things may be great, but when there’s a question, you win. Right?”

    “There has to be a way to come to a final decision.”

    “No, there doesn’t. Every time someone starts talking about final anythings in politics, that means the atrocities are warming up. Humanity has done amazing things by just muddling through, arguing and complaining and fighting and negotiating. It’s messy and undignified, but it’s when we’re at our best, because everyone gets to have a voice in it. Even if everyone else is trying to shout it down. Whenever there’s just one voice that matters, something terrible comes out of it.”

    p. 393

16. 

    “See if there’s anyone out there with a plan, or if we’re going to have to make one up on our own.”

    “We can do that,” Amos said. “Shouldn’t be hard.”

    “You sure?” Alex said. “This is Medina Station under occupation by a bunch of splinter Martian military expats. It’s not Baltimore.”

    Amos’ smile was as placid as always. “Everywhere’s Baltimore.”

    p. 195

17. 

    She couldn’t beat sense into a stone. Not even when it seemed fun to try.

    p. 122

18. 

    Collaboration with the dead left questions that could never be answered.

    p. 87

19. 

    An invisible line in space, unmarked by anything more than what people believed about it. And that was enough.

    p. 430

20. 

    All the food chemists in the system will never do better than evolution at making a decent tea leaf.

    p. 143

21. 

    The sad fact of the human species that High Consul Duarte understood so well was that you could never overcome tribalism and jingoism with an argument. Tribalism was an irrational position, and it was impossible to defeat an irrational position with a rational argument.

    p. 310

22. 

    If they kill us all, Drummer thought, this will be why. Not their technology, not their strategy, not the invisible cycle of history. It’ll be our inability to do anything without five committee meetings to talk about it.

    p. 248

23. 

    It was always dangerous when the universe fell down in a pattern where the thing you wanted and the wise path were the same.

    p. 358

24. 

    Her shoulders were tight. She felt like they were in the moment between throwing dice and seeing what numbers had come up. The gambler’s high. She didn’t like how much she liked it.

    p. 124

25. 

    I mean, I’m all for forgiveness and bygones being bygones, but it’s easier to stomach that after the assholes are all dead.”

    p. 123

26. 

    Nothing degraded morale like the sense that the potential for excellence was being denied.

    p. 428

27. 

    “When we get out,” she said. “Not if. When. We’re going to need a plan. If every ship just bolts off on its own, we’ll lose contact. They shouldn’t know where we went, but we should. At the very least, we should have a record of who went where. This every-man-for-himself-and-God-against-all shit’s romantic, but we have to plan for something past just this.”

    p. 377

28. 

    Everyone spies on everyone, Camina. Let’s not pretend to be outraged at water for being wet.

    p. 147

29. 

    The universe owed her a little slice of luck like that.

    p. 437

30. 

    The universe was tricky, and its sense of humor came with teeth.

    p. 352

31. 

    Time healed all wounds, but it didn’t erase the scars so much as decorate them.

    p. 20

32. 

    Bobbie felt the pressure of time slipping away like she was watching a door close, with her on the wrong side of it.

    p. 301

33. 

    Put a dozen people in front of their cameras, and you’d wind up with thirteen opinions.

    p. 247

34. 

    The question wasn’t whether moving psychoactive alien seedpods between worlds was a good idea so much as whether someone was going to lose face in front of a committee meeting. Thus were the great decisions of history made.

    p. 109

35. 

    “Ah! I see what you’re doing,” Alex said. “You’re trying to make flying out to Charon and dodging radiation flares sound like a good idea. It’s that whole ‘I’ll put a shitty idea next to a really shitty idea so the first one looks shiny by comparison’ thing.”

    p. 446

36. 

    Insects buzzed about, still the best-designed pollinating system there was. Technology did a lot of things well, but evolution had it beat when it came to environmental systems.

    p. 276

37. 

    Still. She had hoped. It never hurt to hope, except when it did.

    p. 369

38. 

    “All we need is one lucky break,” she said. “One thing to go our way, and your logistical mastermind who would never overreach loses his capital ship in front of everyone who’s watching. And I think everyone is watching.”

    “They are,” Avasarala agreed with a sigh. “But …”

    “But what?”

    Avasarala’s smile was thin, hard, and bitter. Her eyes flashed with an intelligence poisoned by despair. “But it isn’t hubris until he’s failed.”

    p. 251

39. 

    It was, to say the least, a very high cost and very low probability of success. Singh assumed there was a faith element to the risk that he was just missing. In his opinion, faith was generally for people who were bad at math.

    p. 255

40. 

    Drummer had read somewhere that newsfeeds were where secular societies went to find out what cultural narratives were important and what could be ignored.

    p. 247

41. 

    Time was supposed to heal all wounds. To Drummer, that was just a nice way of saying that if she waited long enough, none of the things that seemed important to her would turn out to matter. Or at least not the way she’d thought they did.

    p. 14

42. 

    “Emily,” Drummer said, “do you know the one thing I am absolutely sure won’t fix any of our problems? Another committee.”

    p. 111

43. 

    It’d be a better world if there was always at least one right answer instead of a basket of fucked.

    p. 433

44. 

    Our backup plan is everyone does this right the first time so we don’t need a backup plan. Understood?

    p. 235

45. 

    As an old drill sergeant had told her, pain is the warrior’s friend. Pain reminds you that you aren’t dead yet.

    p. 26

46. 

    A brig had rules. It had expectations. You were in a brig until your lawyer or union rep came to talk to you. There would be hearings. If it went badly, there was prison. One thing followed another, and everyone called it justice, even when they all knew it was an approximation at best.

    p. 186

47. 

    “It’s reading as an incredibly strong magnetic field focused down to a narrow beam.”

    “Is that possible?” the duty officer said, her voice small and tight.

    “Only if you define ‘possible’ as things that have already happened,” Naomi said, not turning to look at her.

    p. 132

48. 

    “We’ll get him,” Alex said. “We’ll always get him back.”

    “Sure we will. Until the time we don’t,” she said. “It’s like this for everyone. There’s always going to be a last time, eventually.”

    p. 383

49. 

    “I mean it happened at the same time, but that’s the thing. Time doesn’t actually work like that. ‘The same time’ is a weird linguistic fantasy. It doesn’t exist. Simultaneity doesn’t act like this.”

    p. 355

50. 

    The imperial view, a history professor at the Naval Academy once said, is the long view. Individuals build empires because they want their names to echo through time. They build massive constructs of stone and steel so that their descendants will remember the people who created the world that they only live in. There were buildings on Earth that were thousands of years old, sometimes the only remaining evidence of empires that thought they would last forever. Hubris, the professor had called it. When people build, they are trying to make an aspiration physical. When they die, their intentions are buried with them. All that’s left is the building.

    p. 35

51. 

    That says more about you than about the reality of things.

    p. 283

52. 

    Every revolution needed its mad bombers, apparently.

    p. 441

53. 

    “The high consul is a very wise, very thoughtful man,” he said. “I have perfect faith that—”

    “No. Stop. ‘Perfect faith’ really tells me everything I need to know,” Holden said. “You think this is a gentle, bloodless conquest, don’t you?”

    “It is, to the degree that you allow it to be.”

    “I was there for the war Duarte started to cover his tracks. I was there for the starving years afterward. Your empire’s hands look a lot cleaner when you get to dictate where history begins and what parts of it don’t count.”

    p. 394

That’s all the quotes.

53 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more