Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes

It’s still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and we’d be sitting pretty in the middle of the Drowned Cities, shipping marble and steel and copper and getting paid Red Chinese for every kilo. We’d be rich and they’d be dead, if there was such a thing as the Scavenge God, or his scales. And that goes double for the Deepwater priests. They’re all full of it. Nothing balances out.
Paolo Bacigalupi
Everything’s bad, until you find something worse.
Paolo Bacigalupi
Crew up, Nailer!" Lucky Girl shouted. "You think I'm going to pull your ass up here like a damn swank?
Paolo Bacigalupi
They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.
Paolo Bacigalupi
Start by loving, instead of needing.
Paolo Bacigalupi
Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans -- vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.
Paolo Bacigalupi
Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.
Paolo Bacigalupi
No one else could see all the bodies she’d left behind, but they were there, looking at her. Or maybe that was just her, looking at herself, and not liking what she saw. Knowing she could never escape her own judging gaze.
Paolo Bacigalupi
The thought burrowed into her heart as darkness fell. It coiled in her guts as she wedged herself amongst the boughs of a tree to sleep. And in the morning, it woke with her and clung to her back, riding on her shoulders as she climbed down, hungry and exhausted from nightmares.
Paolo Bacigalupi
Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness.
Paolo Bacigalupi
The Drowned Cities hadn’t always been broken. People broke it. First they called people traitors and said they didn’t belong. Said these people were good and those people were evil, and it kept going, because people always responded, and pretty soon the place was a roaring hell because no one took responsibility for what they did, and how it would drive others to respond.
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.
Paolo Bacigalupi
Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way if justice.
Paolo Bacigalupi
Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.
Paolo Bacigalupi
A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and again. She kept walking, waiting for the bullet.
Paolo Bacigalupi
Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.
Paolo Bacigalupi