Quote

She’d survived the Drowned Cities because she wasn’t anything like Mouse. When the bullets started flying and warlords started making examples of peacekeeper collaborators, Mahlia had kept her head down, instead of standing up like Mouse. She’d looked out for herself, first. And because of that, she’d survived.

Paolo Bacigalupi

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Paolo Bacigalupi
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: August 6
Environmentalist
Fantasy Author
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Paonia
Colorado
Paolo Tadini Bacigalupi
Started
Flying
Warlords
Head
Kept
Collaborators
Making
Looked
Drowned
Anything
Standing
Mouse
Firsts
Instead
Examples
First
Cities
Mice
Like
Example
Bullets
Wasn
Survived

More quotes by Paolo Bacigalupi

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What I'm hoping to do though is to ground my extrapolations in specificity, and to make sure that the story I tell is deliberately and honestly told.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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When I read, I'm either reading to learn, or I'm reading to switch off.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Plenty of people say my guesses about a future drought in the western U.S. (where I live and grew up) are wrong, so I don't see why I won't be wrong in some people's eyes when I go set a story on foreign shores.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Environmental science is telling us a lot about our future and what it could look like, whether we're talking about global warming (the current poster child for the environment) or a loss of genetic diversity in our food supplies, or the effects of low-dose chemicals on human development.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Take three different Thai writers and ask them to extrapolate their county's future, and one hopes that you'll get three very different - but all deeply honest - versions.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Nothing so mystical. Human beings hunger for killing, that is all. It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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I used to love reading, but since I've started writing, it's harder for me to immerse, because I spend so much time looking at how the story is structured and trying to see what the author is doing behind the curtain.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Most of the news about the state of the environment is pretty ugly. This is frightening for me personally, but actually motivational for me artistically.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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When you were alone in the rising ocean, you grabbed whatever raft passed by.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Debts are a heavy burden. Throw them off, and you walk free.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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She smiles at him, too young to know him for a stranger, and too innocent yet to care.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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The more you read about and immerse in a culture, the more it comes alive, and the more textured and nuanced and detailed and unstereotypable it becomes.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.
Paolo Bacigalupi
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It’s human nature to tear one another apart. Be glad you come from such a successful line of killers.
Paolo Bacigalupi