“That's the problem with the truth," Darcy said. "Liars and honest men both claim to have it.”
“Elise asked what nostalgic meant, and Jewel said, “It’s where you think the past was better than it really was, only because the present sucks so bad.”
“My only wish is that we leave room for hope. There is good and bad in all things. We find what we expect to find. We see what we expect to see. I have learned that if I tilt my head just right and squint, the world outside is beautiful. The future is bright. There are good things to come.”
“Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying.”
“It doesn’t bother me that I won’t be around one day,” Lukas said after a while. “I don’t stress about the fact that I wasn’t here a hundred years ago. I think death will be a lot like that. A hundred years from now my life will be just like it was a hundred years ago.”
“There was no going back. Apologies weren't welds; they were just an admission that something had been broken. Often between two people.”
“Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story -- the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.”
“Maybe the kinds of people who try to shape the world feel like they’re smarter than chaos itself.”
“The idea of saving anything was folly, a life especially. No life had been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.”
“And every mistake. But every good thing we do as well. They are immortal, every single touch we leave behind. Even if nobody sees them or remembers them, that doesn’t matter. That trail will always be what happened, what we did, every choice. The past lives on forever. There’s no changing it.”
“Our actions, you know? They last forever. Whatever we do, it’ll always be what we did. There’s no taking them back.”
“There is good and bad in all things. We find what we expect to find. We see what we expect to see. I have learned that if I tilt my head just right and squint, the world outside is beautiful.”
“...Everything we do is left in...like a trail out there, a big ring of decisions. Every action we take-"
"And mistake."
"And every mistake. But every good thing we do as well. They are immortal, every single touch we leave behind. Even if nobody sees them or remembers them, that doesn't matter. That trail will always be what happened, what we did, every choice. The past lives on forever. There's no changing it.”
“Where a story ends is nothing more than a snapshot in time, a brief flash of emotion, a pause. How and if it continues is up to us.”
“The idea of saving anything was folly, a life especially. No life had ever been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.”
“There were those who wanted to live right there, who were reticent to venture any further.”
“It was what to replace injustice with that very few gave thought to.”
“The world out there was the way it was no matter how much doubt or hope or hate a person breathed into it.”
“Gravity is a bitch until she's on your side.”
“This was how it worked. You lived. You did your best. You got out of the way. You let those who come after you choose. You let them decide for themselves, live their own lives. This was the way.”
“There was something about being sent to one’s death and surviving a baptism of fire upon one’s return that pushed most squabblings into the deepest recesses of one’s mind.”
“Being cooped up was not new. Living in the middle of a desert wasteland where it wasn’t safe to go out was not new. Being surrounded by men she ought to fear was not new. Stationed in Iraq during the Second Iranian War, Charlotte had grown accustomed to these things, to not leaving base, to not wanting to leave her bunk or a bathroom stall. She was used to this struggle to keep sane. It was mental as much as physical exercise that was required.”
“No life had ever been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.”
“Dust rained in the halls of Mechanical; it shivered free from the violence of the digging.”
“Daytime was a shift, each one endured like a quantum of life, all the short-term planning leading up to another bout of darkness, little thought given to stringing those days into something useful, some chain of valuable pearls. Just another day to survive.”
“He nodded and dabbed at his forehead with his sleeve. “And every mistake. But every good thing we do as well. They are immortal, every single touch we leave behind. Even if nobody sees them or remembers them, that doesn’t matter. That trail will always be what happened, what we did, every choice. The past lives on forever. There’s no changing it.”
“The tweezers weren’t where they were supposed to be. He dug in the bottom of the kit until he found them, cursed the men on other shifts with no respect for their colleagues. It was like living in a dorm, Darcy thought. No, not the right word, the right memory. Like living in a barracks. It was the semblance of order over an underlying mess. Crisp sheets with folded corners over stained mattresses. That’s what this was, people not putting things back where they belonged.”
“There were thousands of women asleep. Many thousands. Charlotte thought of the army she could raise. But she wondered if Donny was right – if they would refuse to fight their fathers and husbands and brothers. It took a strange kind of courage to do that.”
“The pressure in the airlock grew, and the folds of her suit found every raised scar across her body, wrinkles pressing where wrinkles had once burned. It was a million pricks from a million gentle needles, every sensitive part of her touched all at once, as if this airlock remembered, as if it knew her. A lover's apology.”
“Fear of anything other than God is mutually exclusive to faith in God.”
“I said, "The children wanted to know what life was like."
Junior said, “They [the children] don’t have any idea how rough it was.”
(George responds)“Or how good it was either! People forget that a picture ain’t made from just one color. Life ain’t all good or all bad. It’s full of everything.”
“We declare that the world is not a mosaic, where a plurality of worlds which are essentially strangers to one another are fitted together, but that it is an organism—all of whose parts are governed by the same principle, revealing it and allowing reduction to it.”
“Even in lies there are sometimes truths revealed.”
“Girls should certainly be heard. It is their voices the world is missing.”
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