204 Quotes by Paolo Bacigalupi

At root, I think that any given technology (think nuclear power, gunpowder, the written word...) has the potential to improve our lives, wound it, and also to create unexpected accidents. It's not the technology that's the problem, it's us, the users. However angelic or demonic, or thoughtful or thoughtless we happen to be is then amplified by our technologies.

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

I'm a chess piece. A pawn,' she said. 'I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.

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

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

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

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

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

Doctors described Jonah as having poor impulse control, which basically meant that Jonah's entire world was a series of decisions that balanced precariously on the razor's edge of clever vs. stupid.