01c. 1999 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
02c. 1999 ADNever beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.Paolo Bacigalupi / quote ↗
03c. 1999 ADThanks 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 / quote ↗
05c. 1999 ADThey’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.Paolo Bacigalupi / quote ↗
06c. 1999 ADCrew up, Nailer!" Lucky Girl shouted. "You think I'm going to pull your ass up here like a damn swank?Paolo Bacigalupi / quote ↗
08c. 1999 ADIt’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 / quote ↗
09c. 1999 ADI was interested in political failure here in the U.S. The way we're failing to work together to solve even our smallest problems, let alone the complex ones.Paolo Bacigalupi / quote ↗
10c. 1999 ADScience fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.Paolo Bacigalupi / quote ↗
11c. 1999 ADI'm not proud of it, but I'm a great liar when I travel. I smile and lie, and things are smooth.Paolo Bacigalupi / quote ↗
12c. 1999 ADI'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works.Paolo Bacigalupi / quote ↗
