1
The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.Paolo Bacigalupi
2
You couldn’t live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.Paolo Bacigalupi
3
Hell, we’re all bullet bait sooner or later. Doubt it makes much difference. You make it to sixteen, you’re a goddamn legend.Paolo Bacigalupi
4
Her face was smeared with mud and blood and ash. Just another bit of debris in the wreckage of war.Paolo Bacigalupi
5
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.Paolo Bacigalupi
6
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 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’d been surviving. She thought that she’d been fighting for herself. But all she’d 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) .Paolo Bacigalupi
7
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.Paolo Bacigalupi
8
But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.Paolo Bacigalupi
9
Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.Paolo Bacigalupi
10
Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.Paolo Bacigalupi
11
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.Paolo Bacigalupi
12
The Drowned Cities hadn’t always been broken. People broke it. First they called people traitors and said they didn’t belong. Said these people were good and those people were evil, and it kept going, because people always responded, and pretty soon the place was a roaring hell because no one took responsibility for what they did, and how it would drive others to respond.Paolo Bacigalupi
13
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.Paolo Bacigalupi
14
No one else could see all the bodies she’d 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 escape her own judging gaze.Paolo Bacigalupi
15
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, riding on her shoulders as she climbed down, hungry and exhausted from nightmares.Paolo Bacigalupi
16
Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.Paolo Bacigalupi
17
They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.Paolo Bacigalupi
18
It’s still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and we’d be sitting pretty in the middle of the Drowned Cities, shipping marble and steel and copper and getting paid Red Chinese for every kilo. We’d be rich and they’d be dead, if there was such a thing as the Scavenge God, or his scales. And that goes double for the Deepwater priests. They’re all full of it. Nothing balances out.Paolo Bacigalupi