Persepolis Rising (The Expanse Book 7)

“It’s the reward of old age,” Avasarala said. “You live long enough, and you can watch everything you worked for become irrelevant.”

I am a human being. Anything that happens to human beings could happen to me.

It seemed to her that the real sign you were getting old was when you stopped needing to prove you weren’t getting old.

schadenfreude

It’d be a better world if there was always at least one right answer instead of a basket of fucked.”

“I don’t want to bet my life on other people being smart,” Holden said.

“I told you that you wouldn’t understand,” Avasarala said, her voice cold and cutting. “The fuckers on the Tempest? I’m telling you they’re us too.”

That seemed to be the human pattern—reach out to the unknown and then make it into the sort of thing you left in the first place. In Holden’s experience, humanity’s drive out into the universe was maybe one part hunger for adventure and exploration to two parts just wanting to get the hell away from each other.

Large, sudden events did that. They changed the way time passed. Not technically, maybe, but as a measure of who he and Bobbie were to each other.