Top 90 Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The future looks a bit bleak to me.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

2. “An untrampled scorpion troubles no one.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

3. “Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

4. “Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

5. “We knew it was all going to go to hell, and we just stood by and watched it happen anyway. There ought to be a prize for that kind of stupidity.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

6. “The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

7. “Knowledge is always two-edged. For every benefit, there is hazard. For every good, evil. Carelessness and convenient solutions lead to chaos.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

8. “When I read, I’m either reading to learn, or I’m reading to switch off.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

9. “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.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

10. “It’s human nature to tear one another apart. Be glad you come from such a successful line of killers.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

11. “The blood bond was nothing. It was the people that mattered. If they covered your back, and you covered theirs, then maybe that was worth calling family. Everything else was just so much smoke and lies.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

12. “Life is exponential. Two becomes four, becomes ten thousand, becomes a plague.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

13. “Some people had to bleed so other people could drink. Simple as that.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

14. “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

15. “A final stand, then. One last battle. At least he could say that he had fought. When he met his brothers and sisters on the far side of death, he would tell them that he had not yielded. He might have betrayed everything that they had been bred for, but he had never yielded.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

16. “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

17. “Desperate people did desperate things, became avatars of unexpected tragedy.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

18. “Food should come from the place of its origin, and stay there. It shouldn’t spend its time crisscrossing the globe for the sake of profit.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

19. “The desert never forgot itself. A thin fall of winter rain was all that kept yucca and creosote blooming. If there was other life, it cowered alongside the banks of the few capillary rivers that braved the blazing lands and never strayed far. The desert never took water for granted.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

20. “The wealthy measure everything with the weight of their money.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

21. “Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

22. “The only reason you think you’ve got morals is because you don’t need money the way regular people do.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

23. “Blood is not destiny, no matter what others may believe.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

24. “It was one of those things everyone had an opinion about – that it was what you had when you didn’t have anything else, that family was always there, that blood was thicker than water, whatever. But when Nailer thought about it, most of those words and ideas just seemed like good excuses for people to behave badly and think they could get away with it. Family wasn’t any more reliable than marriages or friendships or blood-sworn crew, and maybe less.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

25. “They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

26. “Family wasn’t any more reliable than marriages or friendships or blood-sworn crew, and maybe less.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

27. “If we can’t describe our reality accurately, we can’t see it.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

28. “So why run? If the whole world was burning, why not face it with a beer in your hand, unafraid?”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

29. “Knowledge is simply a terrible ocean we must cross, and hope that wisdom lies on the other side.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

30. “She smiles at him, too young to know him for a stranger, and too innocent yet to care.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

31. “Blood is not destiny.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

32. “Men are loyal when you lead from the front.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

33. “You didn’t judge people for caving under pressure; you judged them for those few times when they were lucky enough to have any choice at all.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

34. “We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

35. “I do not fight battles that cannot be won. Do not confuse that with cowardice.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

36. “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

37. “I write at a standing desk, which has helped me be much more productive and solved some back problems, but mostly all my quirky habits have to do with procrastination and avoidance rather than with work. I’m slowly trying to stamp those out.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

38. “That is the nature of our beasts and plagues. They are not dumb machines to be driven about. They have their own needs and hungers. Their own evolutionary demands. They must mutate and adapt, and so you will never be done with me, and when I am gone, what will you do then? We have released demons upon the world, and your walls are only as good as my intellect. Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

39. “You’re afraid to gamble even when you’re already dead.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

40. “If you wanted to look at evil, it was just a bunch of suits and ties, a bunch of cubicles and computers, the quiet whirring of commerce. Evil wasn’t anything. It was just business as usual.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

41. “Nailer smiled bitterly in the acrid wind. That was what thinking about clipper ships got you. A lungful of smoke because you weren’t paying attention to what was around.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

42. “Why did they give up?” Nailer asked. “Sometimes people learn,” Tool said. From that, Nailer took him to be saying that mostly people didn’t. The wreckage of the twin dead cities was good evidence of just how slow the people of the Accelerated Age had been to accept their changing circumstances.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

43. “Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

44. “Debts are a heavy burden. Throw them off, and you walk free.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

45. “Hock Seng doesn’t pause to ask any more. He turns and runs, as fast as his old bones will carry him. Cursing himself all the way. Cursing that he was a fool and didn’t put his nose to the wind, that he let himself be distracted from bare survival by the urgent wish to do something more, to reach ahead.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

46. “A desert’s a stupid place to put a river.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

47. “All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others’ lives for it.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

48. “Start by loving, instead of needing.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

49. “I don’t need books about how things used to be. Everybody talks about how things used to be. I need a book about how I’m supposed to live now. Unless you got a book like that, I don’t need the weight.” She.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

50. “It was a view of the world that anticipated evil from people because people always delivered. And the worst part was that she couldn’t really argue.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi