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The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.

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
Behind
Everyone
Ghosts
Left
Surviving
Problem
Riding
Ever
Ended
Ghost
Shoulders
Behinds

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She smiles at him, too young to know him for a stranger, and too innocent yet to care.
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Blood is not destiny.
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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.
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I do not fight battles that cannot be won. Do not confuse that with cowardice.
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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.
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Killing isn't free. It takes something out of you every time you do it. You get their life they get a piece of your soul. It's always a trade.
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It’s human nature to tear one another apart. Be glad you come from such a successful line of killers.
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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.
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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.
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Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.
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Men are loyal when you lead from the front.
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Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream.
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I'm a chess piece. A pawn,' she said. 'I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.
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Knowledge is always two-edged. For every benefit, there is hazard. For every good, evil.
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A desert's a stupid place to put a river.
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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.
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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.
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Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?
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Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.
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