Expanse Quotes

“The city loomed out of the landscape like a fortress. I saw what walls we build against the prairie, how timidly we huddle together, how effectively we close off its vastness of space and make for ourselves another space of more human proportions.

Nearly every inch of land [along my 600 mile drive] had been painstakingly turn over, furrow by furrow. It seemed some unknowable comment on the human spirit that we should, despite our walls, have turned ourselves into an army of Lady Macbeths, rubbing out so relentlessly such a terrible space.”
― Paul Gruchow, Journal of a Prairie Year

“Here is the problem, they said to themselves, and there is the solution. That it was drowned in innocent blood was as trivial as the font the reports were printed in. They had disconnected themselves from humanity. Shut off the cell clusters in their brains that made life besides their own sacred. Or valuable. Or worth saving. All it had cost them was every human connection.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“She paused the image. Her fingertip traced the outline of the attacker.

“Who are you?” she asked the screen. “What do you want?”
― James S.A. Corey, Caliban’s War

“Universe spent a lot of time telling you something. Now you’re second-guessing it. Maybe all those other things were getting you ready for this. […] I know you. And I know you’re the kind that likes to pretend she doesn’t know things she knows so that there won’t be friction. So if you’re thinking maybe you’re wrong so things are okay, you better check again, make sure things are okay. The universe needs a knife, then it makes a knife. And no one sharper, you.” - Babylon’s Ashes, p55, Josep talking to Michio Pa”
― James S.A. Corey

“To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.
But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“I’m a cop,” Miller said. “I find things out.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“He couldn’t judge how dangerous the truth was until he knew it—which was itself a fine reason to keep going.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“Everything he’d ever had was gone. His job, his community. He wasn’t even a cop anymore, his checked-in-luggage handgun notwithstanding. He would never eat at the little East Indian cart at the edge of sector nine again. The receptionist at the station would never nod her greeting to him as he headed in for his desk again. No more nights at the bar with the other cops, no more off-color stories about busts gone weird, no more kids flying kites in the high tunnels. 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.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“She could no more pick out the light of its death than pluck a particular molecule of salt from the ocean, but she knew it was there, and the fact was like a stone in her belly.”
― James S.A. Corey, Caliban’s War

“If human logic were left to define this existence, we would not have an existence.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The acquisition of knowledge is far more about learning how much there is that we don’t know. And if in all of our learning we haven’t learned that, I doubt that we’ve learned much of anything.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“To assume that all knowledge is accessible to the instruments of science or human logic is to hold this existence to the confines of both.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough