Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes

Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way if justice.

Her face was smeared with mud and blood and ash. Just another bit of debris in the wreckage of war.

We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and...

Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.

Belief.” He snorted. “I could kiss a thousand crosses. Fucking belief.

Start by loving, instead of needing.

Jesus walked on water, so maybe he makes aquifers, too.

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the ...

Everything’s bad, until you find something worse.

The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind ...

Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and thei...

No one else could see all the bodies she’d left behind, but they were there, looking at her. Or mayb...

Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you’d seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some les...

Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.

Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.

The Drowned Cities hadn’t always been broken. People broke it. First they called people traitors and...

Hell, we’re all bullet bait sooner or later. Doubt it makes much difference. You make it to sixteen,...

Mahlia… understood Doctor Mahfouz and his blind rush into the village. He wasn’t trying to change th...

The thought burrowed into her heart as darkness fell. It coiled in her guts as she wedged herself am...

Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.

It’s still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and we’d be sitting pre...

But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they alway...

Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in...

They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.

A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and aga...

You couldn’t live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.

Believing is for Santa Claus, right? It's for Tooth Fairies. It's for your boyfriend when he says he...

I'm a chess piece. A pawn,' she said. 'I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured...

Family. It was just a word…Could see its letters all strung together. But it was a symbol, too. And ...

Crew up, Nailer!" Lucky Girl shouted. "You think I'm going to pull your ass up here like a damn swan...

I was interested in political failure here in the U.S. The way we're failing to work together to sol...

At root, I think that any given technology (think nuclear power, gunpowder, the written word...) has...

The more I write stories for young people, and the more young readers I meet, the more I'm struck by...

Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.

I'm not proud of it, but I'm a great liar when I travel. I smile and lie, and things are smooth.

I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventio...