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

A decent idea now is way better than a brilliant plan when it’s too late.

That man could take a visitation from God with thirty underdressed angels announcing that sex was okay after all and make it seem vaguely depressing.

There was a time, Prax knew, that the violence would have bothered him. Not the blood or bodies. He’d spent more than enough time doing dissections and even autonomous-limb vivisection to be able to wall off what he was seeing from any particular sense of visceral horror. But that it was something done in anger, that the men and women he’d just seen blown apart hadn’t donated their bodies or tissues, would have affected him once. The universe had taken that from him, and he couldn’t say now exactly when it had happened. Part of him was numb, and maybe it always would be. There was a feeling of loss in that, but it was intellectual.