It was just easier. She understood now why adults lied to children. It wasn’t love. It was exhaustion. - James S. A. Corey

There was no point to the attack except spite and the kind of violence that passed for meaning in the face of despair.

I hope we don’t start shooting, but what I hope will happen and what actually happens are almost never the same.

Klinger knew nothing about him but what she’d been told by Laconia. She would have been just as solicitous to anyone who had come in his position. And if someone else had been in her role, he would have treated them the same way he did her. They weren’t people to each other. They were roles. This was etiquette, and the inauthenticity of the situation oppressed him.