Daniel Abraham Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

That man could take a visitation from God with thirty underdressed angels announcing that sex was okay after all and make it seem vaguely depressing.

Daniel Abraham
This was the kind of man who'd killed Julie, Miller thought. Stupid. Shortsighted. A man born with a sense for raw opportunity where his soul should have been.

Daniel Abraham
There's a right thing to do, Holden said.
You don't have a right thing, friend, Miller said. You've got a whole plateful of maybe a little less wrong.

Daniel Abraham
We regret the necessity of this action, she said to everyone everywhere. But in the cause of freedom, there can be no compromise.
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 we'll be free.

Daniel Abraham
He couldn't fix the cancer of war, couldn't even slow down the spread, but at least he could admit it was happening.

Daniel Abraham
It was a real book—onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent.

Daniel Abraham
Can you love someone you don't trust?" "Absolutely," he said. "I have a sister I wouldn't lend two copper lengths if I wanted them back. The problem with loving someone you don't trust is finding the right distance.

Daniel Abraham
It's the problem with politics. Your enemies are often your allies. And vice versa.

Daniel Abraham
It was as easy as keying in a door code. Somehow he felt that arming fusion bombs to detonate around him should have been more difficult.

Daniel Abraham
Say what you will about organized crime, at least it's organized.

Daniel Abraham
Writers are a basically insecure bunch. We are convinced that everything we do sucks, all the time. It's something you have to fight. The best way to make sure that your writing will never be particularly good is to use it for something besides telling the story. And I think there's a real tension between sophistication and accessibility.

Daniel Abraham
He considered recording it. His suit would be able to make a simple visual file and stream the data out in real time. But no. This was his moment. His and Julia's. The rest of humanity could guess what it had been like if they cared.

Daniel Abraham
If things got out of hand, it would mean six or seven million dead people and the end of everything Miller had ever known.
Odd that it should feel almost like relief.

Daniel Abraham
See, this is why I can't ever be in command, she said.
Don't like making tough calls with incomplete information?
More I'm not suicidally irresponsible, she replied.

Daniel Abraham
If Fred couldn't build himself a peace treaty, the OPA would never win against the discipline and unity of an inner planet navy. But they would also never lose. War without end.
Well, what was history if not that?
And how would having the stars change anything?

Daniel Abraham
When, Miller wondered, does someone stop being human? There had to be a moment, some decision that you made and before it, you were one person, and after it, someone else... If he'd seen it in someone else—Muss, Havelock, Sematimba—he wouldn't have taken more than a minute to realize they'd gone off the rails. Since it was him, he had taken longer to notice. But Holden was right. Somewhere along the line, he'd lost himself.

Daniel Abraham
The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending.

Daniel Abraham
I choose not to believe in any gods as an act of charity, Marcus said. Charity toward whom? Toward the gods. Seems rude to think they couldn't make a world better than this,

Daniel Abraham
She didn't care. Not caring was how she got through the day.

Daniel Abraham
He cut the connection before she could answer. Long goodbyes weren't anyone's strong suit.

Daniel Abraham
There was life out there. They had proof of it now. And the proof came in the shape of a weapon, so what did that tell him?

Daniel Abraham
Holden decided that he was okay with not feeling any remorse for them. The moral complexity of the situation had grown past his ability to process it, so he just relaxed in the warm glow of victory instead.

Daniel Abraham
And now they were making music from the screams of the dying. Of the dead. The were dancing to it in the low-rent clubs. What it must be like, Miller thought, to be young and soulless.
But no. That wasn't fair. Diogo was a good kid. He was just naive. The universe would take care of that, given a little time.

Daniel Abraham
I think that the successful genres of a particular period are reflections of the needs and thoughts and social struggles of that time. When you see a bunch of similar projects meeting with success, you've found a place in the social landscape where a particular story (or moral or scenario) speaks to readers. You've found a place where the things that stories offer are most needed.
And since the thing that stories most often offer is comfort, you've found someplace rich with anxiety and uncertainty.

Daniel Abraham
I don't find fantasy to be more or less suited to philosophical questions than any other genre, really. I think that the soul of fantasy—or second-world fantasy at least—is our problematic relationship with nostalgia. The impulse to return to a golden age seems to be pretty close to the bone, at least in western cultures, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's a human universal. For me, it's tied up with the experience of aging and the impulse to recapture youth. Epic fantasy, I think, takes its power from that. We create golden eras and either celebrate them or—more often—mourn their loss.

Daniel Abraham
Stop, Holden said. I don't care. I don't want to hear any more of your stories about how being a cop makes you wiser and deeper and able to face the truth about humanity. As far as I can tell, all it did was break you. Okay?
Yeah, okay.
Dresden and his Protogen buddies thought they could choose who lives and who dies. That sound familiar? And don't tell me it's different this time, because everyone says that, every time. And it's not.

Daniel Abraham
He probed himself like a doctor searching for inflammation. Did it hurt here? Did he feel the loss there?
He didn't. There was only a sense of relief so profound it approached giddiness.

Daniel Abraham
The enlisted guys will be okay, but the officers get the sense of humor trained out of 'em.

Daniel Abraham
Never knew if you had any luck left unless you pushed it.

Daniel Abraham
If Miller had ever been called upon to describe her, the phrase deceptive coloration would have figured in.

Daniel Abraham