Adam-Troy Castro Quotes

Talent’s cheap…historically, one of the cheapest things you can buy. And considering the sheer amount of angst you carry around on your back, you need it. After all, angst from a Talented person is fascinating; angst from a Common Everyday Nobody is just an annoyance.

It’s almost comical. Nobody knew anything, but everybody took that as proof of the hypothesis.

I’m going to die.
But that meant nothing, too, because we were all going to die, and every breath of air I managed to wrest from the universe was one more the nightmares of my childhood had failed to deny me. When I breathed it was an act of defiance. When I breathed it was a victory.

Any messages?"
Oscin said, "Just a lot of people dreading whatever you plan to do next.

All of this had seemed so obvious and vital to them once. But then it changed, in the timeless time since putting their vessel together; some might even say, they’d degenerated. They were no longer the beings who’d set themselves an impossible task and built themselves a miraculous vessel to help them accomplish it. In that time they had forgotten all of their arcane and hard-won knowledge and become passengers, instead of engineers. Now the bubble piloted itself, without their input; and the glorious mission that had once been the whole reason for their existence now seemed nothing but an ancient folly, too far gone to change.
They wouldn’t have understood Vietnam, but they would have sympathized.

The question is, just how do we tackle this problem? Do we merely modulate your Ego so it's less irritating? Admittedly, that might make you easier to take – but it won't address the real core of the problem, which is that when all is said and done you really don't have a lot to be egotistical about."
"That can't be true! My Haiku alone –"
"First rule of human social interaction, Mr. Porter: If you have to lead with Haiku, you've already lost.

There was never any shortage of Despair; it had always been far more common than hope, and there was always more being manufactured, everywhere in the universe. That was what made it such a convenient, and inexhaustible, Fuel.

Every once in a while, some poor bastard get saddled with the kind of impossible decision that destroys his career and makes his name a curse for the next hundred years.

Like all career diplomats, he’d spent a lifetime sculpting the truth into the shapes that best suited the needs of the moment, and would see nothing wrong with doing the same now.

Cottonmouth was the kind of small town that hugs its knees to its chest and shuts out all evidence of a greater world beyond.

Are you refusing a direct order?"
"Tell me to die for no good reason and I'll do more than refuse, I'll shove the order up your ass.

Management’s never been interested in really doing the job, not at any point in human history. Management’s true agenda has always been making things more pleasant for Management.

You want to know why humanity’s never been involved in a serious interspecies conflict? Because it’s like going out to eat when you have a pantry full of food at home. Why bother sampling the buffets elsewhere when we haven’t worked out all the great ways to kill each other yet?

I could only read the delay as a dramatic pause. Theatrics. Or diplomacy; wise men throughout history had already noticed that sometimes there wasn’t much of a difference between the two.

Art isn’t just technique, in any culture…it’s also Content. It’s understanding not just How, but also What, to express.