Paolo Bacigalupi quotes

Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot smokier and less defined.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Hands #Ideas #Long

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

#Riding #Ghost #Problem

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

#Real #Stitches #Toys

When you were alone in the rising ocean, you grabbed whatever raft passed by.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Ocean #Rising

I do not fight battles that cannot be won. Do not confuse that with cowardice.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Fighting #Battle #Cowardice

It’s human nature to tear one another apart. Be glad you come from such a successful line of killers.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Successful #Tears #Lines

Food should come from the place of its origin, and stay there. It shouldn't spend its time crisscrossing the globe for the sake of profit.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Sake #Should #Profit

Knowledge is always two-edged. For every benefit, there is hazard. For every good, evil.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Two #Evil #Benefits

Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Suicide

No one else noticed, or cared. It was just something they did. Taking other people’s livestock. Other people’s lives. She watched the soldiers, hating them. They were different in so many ways, white and black, yellow and brown, skinny, short, tall, small, but they were all the same. Didn’t matter if they wore finger-bone necklaces, or baby teeth on bracelets, or tattoos on their chests to ward off bullets. In the end, they were all mangled with battle scars and their eyes were all dead.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Tattoo #Baby #Hate

She’d survived the Drowned Cities because she wasn’t anything like Mouse. When the bullets started flying and warlords started making examples of peacekeeper collaborators, Mahlia had kept her head down, instead of standing up like Mouse. She’d looked out for herself, first. And because of that, she’d survived.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Cities #Flying #Bullets

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

#Thinking #Mad #Made

They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Breathing #Gold #Blame

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

#Running #Pain #Yield

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.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Games #Pieces #Chess

Don't tell me about worth," Nita said. "My father commands fleets." "The wealthy measure everything with the weight of their money." Tool leaned close. "Sadna once risked herself and the rest of her crew to help me escape from an oil fire... Your father commands fleets. And thousands of half-men, I am sure. But would he risk himself to save a single one?
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Father #Men #Oil

Debts are a heavy burden. Throw them off, and you walk free.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Debt #Burden #Heavy

They say in the military that a good battle plan can last as long as five minutes in real fighting. After that, it comes down to if the general is favored by fate and the spirits.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Military #Real #Fighting

Knowledge is simply a terrible ocean we must cross, and hope that wisdom lies on the other side.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Lying #Ocean #Sides

We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Writing #Blow #Dust

A desert's a stupid place to put a river.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Stupid #Rivers #Desert

Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Law #Paper #Ease

At first, when California started winning its water lawsuits and shutting off cities, the displaced people just followed the water-right to California. It took a little while before the bureaucrats realized what was going on, but finally someone with a sharp pencil did the math and realized that taking in people along with their water didn't solve a water shortage.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Math #Winning #Cities

Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Sex #Coffee #Hypocrisy

All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the (Environment) Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others' lives for it.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Average #Wish #Hazards

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.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Nature #Tinkering #World

Killing isn't free. It takes something out of you every time you do it. You get their life; they get a piece of your soul. It's always a trade.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Soul #Pieces #Killing

Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Poetic #Creation #Something New

She smiles at him, too young to know him for a stranger, and too innocent yet to care.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Care #Stranger #Innocent

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

#Boys #Cities #Soldier

Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Men #Doubt #Ugly

Blood is not destiny.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Destiny #Blood

Nothing so mystical. Human beings hunger for killing, that is all. It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Hatred #Division #Biting

Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Dog #Mercy #Accepting

Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Law #Justice #Confusing

For me as a kid, reading cyberpunk was like seeing the world for the first time. Gibson's Neuromancer wasn't just stylistically stunning; it felt like the template for a future that we were actively building. I remember reading Sterling's Islands in the Net and suddenly understanding the disruptive potential of technology once it got out into the street. Cyberpunk felt urgent. It wasn't the future 15 minutes out-it was the future sideswiping you and leaving you in a full-body cast as it passed by.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Reading #Kids #Technology

Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Life #Two #Four

Men are loyal when you lead from the front.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Leadership #Men #Loyal

If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Long #Approval #Humans

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
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Stupid #Fighting #Doctors

An untrampled scorpion troubles no one.
-- Paolo Bacigalupi

#Scorpions #Trouble