Adam-Troy Castro Quotes

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

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?

Human bureaucracies, and most alien ones, are slow by design, their response times slowed to a crawl despite all the technologies we employ to make their progress visible to the naked eye. That’s because they’re still subject to all the delays native to organic life: the mistakes, indecision, the malice, the covering of asses, and the reluctance to transmit even the most urgent message until after a leisurely break for lunch.

What do you think about their position? Do you think it's right for sentient creatures to be owned?"
He emitted a short, cynical laugh, driven by the kind of anger that drives entire lives. "We're all owned, Counselor. It's just a matter of choosing who holds the deed.

It was stupid to feel fear. Fear was nothing but the body’s involuntary response to perceived threats. Fear increased heartbeat, respiration, and perspiration; fear clouded the mind and paralyzed the limbs, and I’m going to die wasn’t subject to logical arguments about its counterproductivity.

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

She’s a little bit below mediocre, isn’t she? And the worst kind of below-par personality at that: the kind who believes herself destined for great things.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When you get to the core of it, we’re all aliens to one another, raised according to some common precepts but otherwise ruled by paradigms far removed from those of the people around us. The tragedy is that we tend to judge others by standards that may make perfect sense to us but which are most likely totally irrelevant to them.

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.

His smile was the wholly unpersuasive kind that only a professional diplomat could carve. Damned if there wasn’t some pretense of compassion in his voice, some veneer of fatherly understanding that gave every word out of his mouth an extra, oily sheen.

He’d played me very well. He’s sensed my misanthropy, and played up that aspect of his own personality. He’d even accused the Porrinyards of the same failing. But was that just the typical gamesmanship of a habitual manipulator, or the obfuscation of a sociopath?