Quotes by Paolo Bacigalupi

“The Drowned Cities hadnt always been broken. People broke it. First they called people traitors and said they didnt belong. Said these people were good and those people were evil, and it kept going...”

“Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness.”

“No one else could see all the bodies shed left behind, but they were there, looking at her. Or maybe that was just her, looking at herself, and not liking what she saw. Knowing she could never esca...”

“The thought burrowed into her heart as darkness fell. It coiled in her guts as she wedged herself amongst the boughs of a tree to sleep. And in the morning, it woke with her and clung to her back, ...”

“Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.”

“Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial wate...”

“Start by loving, instead of needing.”

“Theyd blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and theyd still blame you.”

“I was interested in political failure here in the U.S. The way we're failing to work together to solve even our smallest problems, let alone the complex ones.”

“Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.”

“I'm not proud of it, but I'm a great liar when I travel. I smile and lie, and things are smooth.”

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

“Crew up, Nailer!" Lucky Girl shouted. "You think I'm going to pull your ass up here like a damn swank?”

“Everythings bad, until you find something worse.”

“Its still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and wed be sitting pretty in the middle of the Drowned Cities, shipping marble and steel and copper and getting paid Red ...”

“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.”

“Mahlia… understood Doctor Mahfouz and his blind rush into the village. He wasn’t trying to change them. He wasn’t trying to save anyone. He was just trying to not be part of the sickness. Mahlia ha...”

“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.”