"We're all traitors now. 'Ha! the old lady said. 'Only if we lose."

"When Miller had started working homicide, one of the things that had struck him was the surreal calm of the victims' families. People who had just lost wives, husbands, children, and lovers. People whose lives had just been branded by violence. More often than not, they were calmly offering drinks and answering questions, making the detectives feel welcome. A civilian coming in unaware might have mistaken them for whole. It was only in the careful way they held themselves and the extra quarter second it took their eyes to focus that Miller could see how deep the damage was."

"I don't kill children, she said. 'Not even when it's the right thing to do."

"She'd been attacked. Just after she came to the Belt. She was seeing that it didn't happen twice.''Attacked,' Miller said, parsing the man's tone of voice. 'Raped?''I didn't ask."

"It was easy to make fun of the marines when they weren't listening. In Holden's navy days, making fun of jarheads was as natural as cussing. But four marines had died getting him off the Donnager, and three of them had made a conscious decision to do so. Holden promised himself that he'd never make fun of them again."

"Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she'll be haunted by what might be behind it."

"Either help or give up. Right now devil's advocate is just another name for asshole."

"We were full of righteous anger and dreams of vengeance when we got here, and a couple of blowjobs and hangovers later it's like nothing ever happened."

"Tilly screamed. Anna's shocked brain only registered annoyance at the sound. Really, when had someone screaming ever solved a problem? She recognized her fixation on this irritation as her own way of avoiding the horror in front of her, but only in a distant and dreamy sort of way."

"God save us all from good-looking men."

"Aw, you goddammed bastards! They're shootin' him while he's down! Son of a bitch!'The ship stopped moving, and Alex said in a quiet voice, 'Suck on this, asshole.'The ship vibrated for half a second, then paused before continuing toward the lock.'Point defense cannons?' Holden asked.'Summary roadside justice,' Alex grunted back."

"Nothing lasted forever. Not peace. Not war. Nothing."

"Some things stayed secrets even when you told them."

"If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they'd all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another's fur."

"That's what it's come to, Miller thought, rubbing a hand across his chin. Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then we'll be free."

"But we don't run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people."

"Intellectually he knows that the blood is being pressed to the back of his body, pooling in the back part of his cerebellum and flooding his kidneys. He hasn't done enough medical work to know what that means, but it can't be good."

"Dead's not good, but at least it's simple."

"There's a dignity in consequences."

"A few generations living and dying without a sky, and enclosed spaces lost the atavistic terror of premature burial."

"Io, this is Admiral Muhan of the Martian Congressional Republic Navy. You fire anything bigger than a bottle rocket and we will glass the whole fucking moon. Do you read me?"

"Well, Han said with a sigh, 'we've gone from no-plan to stupid-plan. That's progress of a sort."

"That's what peace is, right? Postponing the conflict until the thing you were fighting over doesn't matter."

"Given their current circumstances, things would have to be very bad indeed for Tilly to think the situation had gotten worse. Sure, they were all trapped in orbit around an alien space station that periodically changed the rules of physics and had killed a bunch of them, but now they'd decided to start shooting each other too.Yes, very bad."

"It was some of Solomon's favorite music because it was dense and intellectually complicated and he wasn't expected to dance to it."

"You can order the sun to come up if you time it right. I'm not driving this bus. Making it do what I want would be like talking someone out of a seizure."

"The only right you have with anyone in life is to the right to walk away."

"They loved scenes of righteous Godly vengeance on sinful mankind. They loved to show God's chosen people safe from harm, watching with happy faces as they were proved right to the world. But they never showed the aftermath. They never showed weeping humans, crushed and dying in pools of their own fluids. Young men smashed into piles of red flesh. A young woman cut in half because she was passing through a hatchway when catastrophe hit. This was Armageddon. This is what it looked like. Blood and torn flesh and cries for help."

"Every empire grow until its reach exceeds its grasp."

"His strike force stood around him, craning their necks, in awe of the massive emptiness all around. He was almost sorry to pull his attention back to the small, vaguely intimate necessities of violence."

"He almost blacks out again, but he's not sure if it's the stroke or the thrust gravity. He's pretty sure driving blood pressure higher while having a stroke is considered poor form."

"It's herding kittens. If kittens had a lot of guns and an overdose of neo-Libertarian property theory."

"The grass is always greener on the other side of personal extinction."

"You're a tough guy, but I'm a nightmare wrapped in the apocalypse."

"Your fancy alien train is broken?''My fancy alien material transfer system has been sitting unused for over a billion years and half the planet just exploded. Your ship was built less than a decade ago and you can barely keep the coffee pot running.'You are a sad, bitter little man."