Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes
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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.
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Maybe because we're photosynthesizing we'll do more work outside. So our laptops will have to get rid of these damn glossy screens that have become so popular. And then we'll sit around outside, sucking up sun, getting fat and green, and surfing the net.
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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.
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Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.
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Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.
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Plenty of people say my guesses about a future drought in the western U.S. (where I live and grew up) are wrong, so I don't see why I won't be wrong in some people's eyes when I go set a story on foreign shores.
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For pleasure, I'll read military sf, or Elmore Leonard capers, anything that's fast and fun. Otherwise, I mostly pick at books, without any clear focus.
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If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.
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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.
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I write at a standing desk, which has helped me be much more productive and solved some back problems, but mostly all my quirky habits have to do with procrastination and avoidance rather than with work. I'm slowly trying to stamp those out.
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The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.
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Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream.
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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.
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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.
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An untrampled scorpion troubles no one.
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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.
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Knowledge is always two-edged. For every benefit, there is hazard. For every good, evil.
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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.
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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.
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But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.
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Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.
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They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.
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It’s human nature to tear one another apart. Be glad you come from such a successful line of killers.
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I like fast plots with things that explode.
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The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.
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Most of the news about the state of the environment is pretty ugly. This is frightening for me personally, but actually motivational for me artistically.
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We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind.
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Of course, the more you read, the more you learn, and ultimately there is more information than you can ever use. The difficulty is that as an outsider, you know you're too ignorant for your own good, and so the urge to keep researching and *never* start writing is pretty strong.
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Knowledge is simply a terrible ocean we must cross, and hope that wisdom lies on the other side.
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Men are loyal when you lead from the front.
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