Adam-Troy Castro

"You want to know why humanity’s never been involved in a serious interspecies conflict? Because it’s like going out to eat when you have a pantry full of food at home. Why bother sampling the buffets elsewhere when we haven’t worked out all the great ways to kill each other yet?"

"“Any messages?” Oscin said, “Just a lot of people dreading whatever you plan to do next.”"

"Every once in a while, some poor bastard get saddled with the kind of impossible decision that destroys his career and makes his name a curse for the next hundred years."

"Like all career diplomats, he’d spent a lifetime sculpting the truth into the shapes that best suited the needs of the moment, and would see nothing wrong with doing the same now."

"They all wore the slack-bored expression of folks doomed to spend all of eternity on an infinitely long supermarket checkout line."

"“In my experience, mediocrity in life-or-death situations gets people killed.” He looked knowing. “Read your history. Greatness kills more.” There was nothing I could say to that."

"Life with too many miracles is just another form of chaos."

"I’m going to die. But that meant nothing, too, because we were all going to die, and every breath of air I managed to wrest from the universe was one more the nightmares of my childhood had failed to deny me. When I breathed it was an act of defiance. When I breathed it was a victory."

"When you get to the core of it, we’re all aliens to one another, raised according to some common precepts but otherwise ruled by paradigms far removed from those of the people around us. The tragedy is that we tend to judge others by standards that may make perfect sense to us but which are most likely totally irrelevant to them."

"He’d played me very well. He’s sensed my misanthropy, and played up that aspect of his own personality. He’d even accused the Porrinyards of the same failing. But was that just the typical gamesmanship of a habitual manipulator, or the obfuscation of a sociopath?"

"What followed was the well-known phenomenon of a group, asked a simple question with an obvious answer, that nevertheless remains silent as everybody waits for somebody else to trigger a suspected rhetorical trap."

"Art isn’t just technique, in any culture…it’s also Content. It’s understanding not just How, but also What, to express."