it felt like waking up over and over without falling sleep in between.

we’ve gone from no-plan to stupid-plan. That’s progress of a sort.

orgasm does release a lot of oxytocin, so I’m probably more fond of you than before.

What have we got?” Ashford said. “Short form.””It’s fucking weird, sir,” Chan said.

No coffee. This is a terrible, terrible planet.

One of your three mothers did the cooking? How traditional,”Naomi said with a smirk.

It was easy to make fun of the marines when they weren’t listening. In Holden’s navy days, making fun of jarheads was as natural as cussing. But four marines had died getting him off the...

Aw, you goddammed bastards! They’re shootin’ him while he’s down! Son of a bitch!”The ship stopped moving, and Alex said in a quiet voice, “Suck on this, asshole.”The ship vibrated for half a second, then...

It was the security man’s nightmare scenario. In the face of death, why wouldn’t there be riots? Why wouldn’t there be killing and theft and rape? If there were no consequences – or if all...

He’d turned away from a life on basic to live in the stars, or if not the stars, at least the rocks that floated free in the night sky.

He remembered the old-timers from his navy days. Grizzled lifers who could soundly sleep while two meters away their shipmates played a raucous game of poker or watched the vids with the volume all the...

It was his job to expect the worst of humanity, including myself.

Either help or give up. Right now devil’s advocate is just another name for asshole.

If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’ll still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She’d look up through a...

It was astounding, Bobbie thought, how quickly humanity could go from What unimaginable intelligence fashioned these soul-wrenching wonders? to Well, since they’re not here, can I have their stuff?

You’re too old for fairy tales,” Baasen said.

She’d been attacked. Just after she came to the Belt. She was seeing that it didn’t happen twice.””Attacked,” Miller said, parsing the man’s tone of voice. “Raped?””I didn’t ask.

Every empire grow until its reach exceeds its grasp

Plus, I have common sense.

The problem with living with miracles was that they made everything seem plausible.

His words were full of hope and threat. Like the stars.

There’s a dignity in consequences.

The OPA man, Anderson Dawes, was sitting on a cloth folding chair outside Miller’s hole, reading a book. It was a real book – onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller...

Dare to be as great as the people who love you mistakenly think you are.

If we accept the premise that we’re always wrong, it really removes the incentive to spend a lot of time trying to make good guesses because even the good guesses turn out to be wrong....

But always there was the voice at the back of his head telling him that by joining the Rebellion he’d become less of a rebel than he’d ever been. Flying off to assault yet another...

That, and I really hate paying taxes.

By the time the Somnambulist had set her creaking bones to rest on their assigned landing pad, Holden had lost all patience with human stupidity.So, of course, it came out to meet him.

Man still has to work, whatever’s in his past, eh?

That’s what it’s come to, Miller thought, rubbing a hand across his chin. Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then...