Adam-Troy Castro Quotes

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 the sort of platitude-laden gibberish that people learn to repeat so they can imagine themselves clever without ever bothering to think an original thought themselves.

Middle management has always favored underlings friendly to middle management. It’s corruption, all right, but of a minor and probably unavoidable sort.

They all wore the slack-bored expression of folks doomed to spend all of eternity on an infinitely long supermarket checkout line.

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

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.

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.

There had never been any violence in her life, up until those last few hours—and there seemed no reason beyond simple self-defense for her to feel the urgency she felt now.
But she did hunger for it. She wanted to feel something alive turn to something dead. She wanted to stand above it at the moment of its dying, and feel the satisfaction of knowing that she’d been the one who drove it from the world of things that live and breathe and feel into the world of things that merely rot.

It was nobody’s idea of luxurious travel, but then I’d known luxurious travel once or twice in my life and found that it just got me to places at the same speed while forcing me to interact with the kind of people who could afford such passage.

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?

Assassination is just diplomacy by other means.

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.

“In my experience, mediocrity in life-or-death situations gets people killed.”
He looked knowing. “Read your history. Greatness kills more.”
There was nothing I could say to that.

It occurred to me a long time ago, Mr. Lastogne, that diplomacy has very little to do with making friends.

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.