Paolo Montes Quotes

Paolo gripped my shoulders and kissed my cheeks. I may have blushed. He was quite handsome when he wasn't bleeding out from dismemberment. ~ Rick Riordan

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

And Marcus is what Cole needs? A cocky, arrogant asshole?" he asked, then paused. "Wait, I see your point." Paolo snorted and Styx smiled. "Figured you would. ~ S.E. Jakes

She is an animal. Servile as a dog. And yet if he is careful to make no demands, to leave the air between them open, another version of the windup girl emerges. As precious and rare as a living bo tree. Her soul, emerging from within the strangling strands of her engineered DNA. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Why did you choose to stay here?" ( ... )
"I don't know," he said. "It's as if there's more oxygen here. ~ Paolo Giordano

I think there are narratives going on all the time that we think of as tangential - up until they turn out to be deciding factors in our lives. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Nothing remains but to hope the end will come to extinguish the unrelenting pain of waiting for it. ~ Pier Paolo Pasolini

Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

I hate your kind."

"Because someone like me made you?" He laughs again. "I'm surprised you aren't more pleased to meet me. You're as close as anyone ever comes to meeting God. Come now, don't you have any questions for God?"

Emiko scowls at him, nods at the cheshires. "If you were my God, you would have made New People first."

The old gaijin laughs. "That would have been exciting."

"We would have beaten you. Just like the cheshires."

"You may yet." He shrugs. "You do not fear cibiscosis or blister rust."

"No." Emiko shakes her head. "We cannot breed. We depend on you for that." She moves her hand. Telltale stutter-stop motion. "I am marked. Always, we are marked. As obvious as a ten-hands or a megodont."

He waves a hand dismissively. "The windup movement is not a required trait. There is no reason it couldn't be removed. Sterility. . ." He shrugs. "Limitations can be stripped away. The safeties are there because of lessons learned, but they are not required; some of them even make it more difficult to create you. Nothing about you is inevitable." He smiles. "Someday, perhaps, all people will be New People and you will look back on us as we now look back at the poor Neanderthals."

Emiko falls silent. The fire crackles. Finally she says, "You know how to do this? Can make me breed true, like the cheshires?"

The old man exchanges a glance with his ladyboy.

"Can you do it ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Death realigns roles according to a formal order of importance. ~ Paolo Giordano

I don't know why we choose to reach out to help another person, or why we decide that we can't, and withdraw and try to care only for ourselves, but I'm fascinated by that choice. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Blood is not destiny. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

I am a fascist, not a racist. ~ Paolo Di Canio

We [European countries] probably need to move forward together, each at their own speed. The faster ones, that could be the countries in the euro zone. The others would be those who are interested in the continued development of the common market, but reject the idea of an ever stronger political integration. ~ Paolo Gentiloni

The sexual freedom of today for most people is really only a convention, an obligation, a social duty, a social anxiety, a necessary feature of the consumer's way of life. ~ Pier Paolo Pasolini

If as a child I had written a story, the best story that I could imagine, I would have written as indeed is happening to me. ~ Paolo Maldini

The route for the refugees currently goes through Greece and the Balkans or through Italy; if there were a crisis in north-eastern Europe, Poland might just as well be affected. In this case we are dealing with mechanisms that we do not control. We need to change that. ~ Paolo Gentiloni

I didn't think of myself as writing 'cli-fi,' but I'll take the label. I'll take any label that makes someone think they might be interested in my stories. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

The thing is, even though you think a lot about your movie, and there's a lot of preparation behind it, the final end result completely goes beyond it. It's not something you're aware of. ~ Paolo Sorrentino

At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Is this how you will die? Is this what you were meant for? To simply be bled out like a pig?
A spark of rage flickers, an antidote to despair.
Will you not even try to survive? Did the scientists make you too stupid even to consider fighting for your own life?
Emiko closes her eyes and prays to Mizuko Jizo Bodhisattva, and then the bakeneko cheshire spirit for good measure. She takes a breath, and then with all her strength she slams her hand against the knife. The blade slices past her neck, a searing line.
"Arai wa?!" the man shouts.
Emiko shoves hard against him and ducks under his flailing knife. Behind her, she hears a grunt and thud as she bolts for the street. She doesn't look back. She plunges into the street, not caring that she shows herself as a windup, not caring that in running she will burn up and die. She runs, determined only to escape the demon behind her. She will burn, but she will not die passive like some pig led to slaughter. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

What I find compelling is the moment in which people realize, with suffering and pain, that in the past there was a time when they were happy, because back then the present and the future coincided - they were one and the same thing. ~ Paolo Sorrentino

He [Paolo Sarpi] was one of the two foremost Italian statesmen since the Middle Ages, the other being Cavour . ~ Andrew Dickson White

Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way if justice. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

How she longed for the uninhibitedness of kids her age, their vacuous sense of immortality. ~ Paolo Giordano

An artist, if he's unselfish and passionate, is always a living protest. Just to open his mouth is to protest: against conformism, against what is official, public, or national, what everyone else feels comfortable with, so the moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because opening his mouth is always scandalous. ~ Pier Paolo Pasolini

The theory of exodus proposes that the most effective way of opposing capitalism and the liberal state is not through direct confrontation but by means of what Paolo Virno has called "engaged withdrawal,"mass defection by those wishing to create new forms of community. One need only glance at the historical record to confirm that most successful forms of popular resistance have taken precisely this form. They have not involved challenging power head on (this usually leads to being slaughtered, or if not, turning into some - often even uglier - variant of the
very thing one first challenged) but from one or another strategy of slipping away from its grasp, from flight, desertion, the founding of new communities. ~ David Graeber

The fear of old age is something that one feels when they're younger. Once you get to being old, you're already there, so you don't even think about it anymore. ~ Paolo Sorrentino

Soldiers have been looting and burning for generations. Perhaps they burned the town because of you, or perhaps they did it because they disliked the whiskey. Soldiers kill and rape and loot for a thousand reasons. The one thing I am certain of is that neither you nor I did this burning." Tool reached down and turned Mahlia's gaze to meet his own. "Do not seek to own what others have done. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

I didn't have to dig deep to love you, Jersey girl. Digging takes work. Falling in love with you was the simplest thing I've ever done. ~ E.L. Montes

I have friends who are science journalists, and I'm seeing stories of theirs or talking with them about ideas that they're pitching. Certain kinds of science are around me all the time, like climate change and biology. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

The conclusion I came to was that even if I couldn't sell books, I still liked the process of writing. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class. ~ John Edward Williams

From the stereo came music that Alice didn't recognize, but it wasn't there to be listened to, just to complete a perfect scenario; there was nothing casual about it. ~ Paolo Giordano

Life is absolutely insane. Yes, life is insane but the great wisdom lies in choosing your insanity wisely. ~ Paulo Coelho

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

Anderson has spent enough time poring over ancient pictures that they seldom affect him. He can usually ignore the foolish confidence of the past - the waste, the arrogance, the absurd wealth - but this one irritates him: the fat flesh hanging off the farang, the astonishing abundance of calories that are so obviously secondary to the color and attractiveness of a market that has thirty varieties of fruit: mangosteens, pineapples, coconuts, certainly. . . but there are no oranges, now. None of these. . . these. . . dragon fruits, none of these pomelos, none of these yellow things. . . lemons. None of them. So many of these things are simply gone.

But the people in the photo don't know it. These dead men and women have no idea that they stand in front of the treasure of the ages, that they inhabit the Eden of the Grahamite Bible where pure souls go to live at the right hand of God. Where all the flavors of the world reside under the careful attentions of Noah and Saint Francis, and where no one starves.

Anderson scans the caption. The fat, self-contented fools have no idea of the genetic gold mine they stand beside. The book doesn't even bother to identify the ngaw. It's just another example of nature's fecundity, taken entirely for granted because they enjoyed so damn much of it. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Don't tell me about worth," Nita said. "My father commands fleets."
"The wealthy measure everything with the weight of their money." Tool leaned close. "Sadna once risked herself and the rest of her crew to help me escape from an oil fire ... Your father commands fleets. And thousands of half-men, I am sure. But would he risk himself to save a single one? ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Only the Indians respect the forest," Paolo said. "The white people cut it all down." Mato Grosso, he went on, was being transformed into domesticated farmland, much of it dedicated to soybeans. In Brazil alone, the Amazon has, over the last four decades, lost some two hundred and seventy thousand square miles of its original forest cover - an area bigger than France. Despite government efforts to reduce deforestation, in just five months in 2007 as much as two thousand seven hundred square miles were destroyed, a region larger than the state of Delaware. Countless ~ David Grann

Those nights when the future seemed to last only till the morning and he would count off the hours, one by one, by the chimes of distant church bells. ~ Paolo Giordano

There's one thing that I like about Rome that was stated by Napoleon: that from sublime to pathetic is only one step away. And in Rome there's a constant shifting between sublime and pathetic. ~ Paolo Sorrentino

In the end, oh I know,
never, in my haggard passion,
have I ever been such a cadaver as now
as I take again in hand my tables of the present
if reality's real, but after it's been
destroyed in the eternal and the moment by
the obsessive idea of a shining nothingness. ~ Pier Paolo Pasolini

The main reason I want someone to read a story of mine is so they can enjoy it and feel like they got something interesting out of it. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Paolo and Francesca were not ideal readers since they confess to Dante that after the first kiss they read no more. Ideal readers would have kissed and then read on. ~ Alberto Manguel