Growing older was a falling away of everything that didn’t matter. And a deepening appreciation of all the parts that were important enough to stay. - James S. A. Corey

The hardest thing was to trust his own people to do their jobs well, but it was what he had to do. He wondered if the high consul suffered the same thing—knowing that all the critical action would be taken by others who were guided by his orders, but in conditions he could only guess at, and in places where his intervention, even if it were possible, could only muddy the waters. It was a subtle and terrible insight. The powerlessness of control.

She’d stopped looking tired a while ago and had moved on to whatever tired turns into when it became a lifestyle.

Writing science fiction is a race between the author's imagination and the progress of science and history. Fiction is always on the losing end; the question is only how fast.