“Nobody as a destiny. I mean, nobody has some kind of inescapable path for their life. This mug was made from clay, and that clay could have been anything at all until somebody made it into a mug. People aren't mugs, we are clay. Living, breathing, thinking, feeling clay, and we can shape ourselves into anything we want, and we keep shaping ourselves all our lives, getting better and better at whatever we want to be, and when we want to be something else we just smooth out the clay and start over. Your lack of 'purpose' is the single best thing about you, because it means you can be whatever you want.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“If my life had no meaning, there was no reason not to end it."
"So you ended it?"
"So I gave it meaning.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“Love is when you find something so great, so... necessary, that it becomes more important to you than your own goals, than your own life - not because your life has no meaning without it, but because it gives your life a meaning it never had before.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“Finally Marcus stepped forward. "If you insist on going through me to get him, it's your call. But I warn you, I will probably cry when you hurt me, and you'll fell bad about it later."
Vinci looked at him. "That's your defiant speech?"
"Get used to it," said Marcus. "There's a lot more useless heroics where that came from.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“She looked at Woolf. "There's some kind of ...thing."
"That sentence wasn't as helpful as you probably intended it to be," said Marcus.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“If you want to survive in this world, you need to stop asking why people work together, and just start working together.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“Embrace your complexity, stretch your creativity, and live up to your potential, you are what makes the world great.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“Life is a lone wolf, scratching out a living with teeth and claws and a heart of stone.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“Do you know what’s going to happen when the world ends? We call it the end of the world, but it’s only the end of us. The world will go on, the planet and the life that lives on it. Rivers will keep flowing, the sun and the moon will keep turning, vines will creep up across the cars and the concrete. There will come soft rain. The world will forget that we were ever here. Human thought—the glorious zenith of five billion years of evolution—will go out like a candle, gone forever. Not because it was time, not because the world moved past us, but because we, as a people, were fools. Too selfish to live in peace, and too proud to stop our wars long after they ceased to have any real meaning...The only thing left of any value on this entire planet is their lives, but that’s not worth anything while the other guy still has his, so they kill each other. They are in a desperate race toward the final death. The winner will be the last one standing, and his prize is the final and most terrible solitude this world has ever known.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“Would they be cheered by their recovery, or marked for life by their trauma?”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“So, your plan is to murder a superior enemy army," said Tovar, "and then outrun the wind. I'm glad it's so simple.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“And we're more valuable to you alive," said Marcus.
Delarosa cocked her head to the side. "How?"
"Because, um..." Marcus grimaced. "I don't actually know, I just assumed because that's what people typically say at this point.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“If my life had no meaning there was no reason not to end it.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“Just because I don’t like you very much doesn’t mean I don’t love you,” said Kessler. “I raised you for ten years; you’re my daughter whether you like it or not.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“You don't apologize for this Samm, it's love, and love doesn't weigh it's options and pick the best one. Love just wants things and it doesn't know why, and it doesn't matter why, because love is the only explanation love needs.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“You weren't designed to cure RM, but you did it anyway. You weren't designed to cross the toxic wasteland, but you did that too, and then you escaped from I don't know how many bad guys, and crossed through the middle of a war zone, and while every other group of weary, bloodied refugees is getting smaller and smaller, yours is getting bigger. You're teaching people, and you're recruiting people, and it's not because you were built that way, or because you had some kind of glorious destiny to fulfill, but because you're you. You're Kira Walker. You're not going to save the world because you're the chosen one, you're going to save it because you want to save it, and nobody in this world works harder for what they want than you do.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“More and more," said Heron, reaching a distance about ten feet away from him, and slowly circling to the side. "Kira, sweetie, I'm going to murder your dad.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“Quiet down," said Falin. "Didn't you say something about an ambush and a murderer?"
"Crap, yes," said Marcus, and pulled Kira down behind the escalator. "Also: murderess. Don't be sexist, women can murder people too.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“That chick makes the monsters under my bed have nightmares.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“Moral," said Vale."That's an interesting adjective to apply to 'genocide'.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“It's like...I can throw away my whole life trying to help somebody else, but i can only do something for me if I know it doesn't matter.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“What happened to you was done out of a fear of extinction, and while that doesn't make it excusable, it at least makes it understandable.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“The rain would fall, the plants would grow, the animals would eat and kill and die and grow again, and the ghost of sentient life would fade away, an insignificant blip in the memory of the Earth. Someday, a million years away, maybe a billion, when another species evolved or awoke or descended from the stars, would they even know that anybody had been here?”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“She would worry about Samm and Marcus when she wasn’t running for her life.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“Last of all, this book owes perhaps its biggest debt to the ultimate models for Kira and Heron and every other awesome girl in the Partials series: my two daughters. May you always have heroines to inspire you, role models to look up to, and the freedom and courage to make your own choices, no matter how simple or scary or hard or eternal they may be.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“Love is when you find something so great, so . . . necessary, that it becomes more important to you than your own goals, than your own life—not because your life has no meaning without it, but because it gives your life a meaning it never had before.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“The most important thing you can ever know is that no matter what your purpose is, that's not your only choice.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“I want to talk to you," she said, "for hours and days and forever, but we can't right now. Not here, and not while we're still in danger.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
“Este libro está dedicado a todos aquellos a quienes odies.
Lo siento. A veces la vida es así.”
― Dan Wells, quote from Ruins
Dan Wells
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“Galling as it may be to be helpless to redress the crying injustices of the past, symbolic expiation in the present can only create new injustices among the living and new problems for the future, when newborn babies enter the world with pre-packaged grievances against other babies born the same day. Both have their future jeopardized, not only by their internal strife but also by the increased vulnerability of disunited society to external dangers from nations and from international terrorist networks.”
― Thomas Sowell, quote from Black Rednecks and White Liberals
“I’ve been lost, Elsie. Lost and drowning since I was a kid … Then I saw you. I saw you and you brought me back to me … Elsie, you brought me life.”
― Tillie Cole, quote from Sweet Soul
“I know what we have to do!” he said, extremely excited.
He pulled me into the living room, sat me down, and took my hands in his. Looking intensely into my eyes, he said, “Babe, we’ve got to have children.”
Wow, I thought, that must have been some fire.
“Ok-aaay,” I said.
“You don’t understand, you don’t understand!” he said, trying to catch me up to his thoughts. “Everything we’ve been working for, the zoo that we’ve been building up, all of our efforts to protect wildlife, it will all stop with us!”
As with every good idea that came into his head, Steve wanted to act on it immediately. Just take it in stride, I said to myself. But he was so sincere. We’d talked about having children before, but for some reason it hit him that the time was now.
“We have got to have children,” he said. “I know that if we have kids, they will carry on when we’re gone.”
“Great,” I said. “Let’s get right on that.”
― Terri Irwin, quote from Steve & Me
“If I had been in charge of reorganizing the government’s security agencies into a homeland defense organization, I would have divided the responsibilities into two agencies: The Bureau of What the Fuck Was That? and The Department of What the Fuck Are We Gonna Do Now?”
― George Carlin, quote from When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
“When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less."
"Unless you love them.”
― Shirley Hazzard, quote from The Transit of Venus
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