Paolo Bacigalupi

Writer

1972-08-06

Quotes by Paolo Bacigalupi

• But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

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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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• Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in his crèche, learning to respect but never yield to. Pain was simply a message, telling him which limbs he could still use to slaughter his enemies, how far he could still run, and what his chances were in the next battle.

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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.

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• Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you'd seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some less. But everybody had it.

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• Her face was smeared with mud and blood and ash. Just another bit of debris in the wreckage of war.

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• Hell, we're all bullet bait sooner or later. Doubt it makes much difference. You make it to sixteen, you're a goddamn legend.

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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.

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• You couldn't live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.

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• The more I write stories for young people, and the more young readers I meet, the more I'm struck by how much kids long to see themselves in stories. To see their identities and perspectives— their avatars— on the page. Not as issues to be addressed or as icons for social commentary, but simply as people who get to do cool things in amazing worlds. Yes, all the —issue— books are great and have a place in literature, but it's a different and wildly joyous gift to find yourself on the pages of an entertainment, experiencing the thrills and chills of a world more adventurous than our own.And when you see that as a writer, you quickly realize that you don't want to be the jerk who says to a young reader, "Sorry, kid. You don't get to exist in story; you're too different." You don't want to be part of our present dystopia that tells kids that if they just stopped being who they are they could have a story written about them, too. That's the role of the bad guy in the dystopian stories, right? Given a choice, I'd rather be the storyteller who says every kid can have a chance to star.

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• Hell, we're all bullet bait sooner or later. Doubt it makes much difference. You make it to sixteen, you're a goddamn legend.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in his crèche, learning to respect but never yield to. Pain was simply a message, telling him which limbs he could still use to slaughter his enemies, how far he could still run, and what his chances were in the next battle.

  Read quote

• But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

  Read quote

• Her face was smeared with mud and blood and ash. Just another bit of debris in the wreckage of war.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you'd seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some less. But everybody had it.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• You couldn't live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.

  Read quote

• The more I write stories for young people, and the more young readers I meet, the more I'm struck by how much kids long to see themselves in stories. To see their identities and perspectives— their avatars— on the page. Not as issues to be addressed or as icons for social commentary, but simply as people who get to do cool things in amazing worlds. Yes, all the —issue— books are great and have a place in literature, but it's a different and wildly joyous gift to find yourself on the pages of an entertainment, experiencing the thrills and chills of a world more adventurous than our own.And when you see that as a writer, you quickly realize that you don't want to be the jerk who says to a young reader, "Sorry, kid. You don't get to exist in story; you're too different." You don't want to be part of our present dystopia that tells kids that if they just stopped being who they are they could have a story written about them, too. That's the role of the bad guy in the dystopian stories, right? Given a choice, I'd rather be the storyteller who says every kid can have a chance to star.

  Read quote