Quotes from Ruins

Dan Wells ·  464 pages

Rating: (13.2K votes)


“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


Video

About the author

Popular quotes

“What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery, and-let’s be frank—fun, fun, fun! There might be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels. There might be great illicit loves, enduring joy, faith-shaking accidents with farm machinery. But you have to not know in order to see what stories your life’s efforts bring you. The mystery is all.”
― Lorrie Moore, quote from Birds of America


“He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere”
― Richard Powers, quote from The Time of Our Singing


“You learn a lot when you know no one else is going to do things for you.”
― Megan Crewe, quote from The Way We Fall


“She likes playing the saxophone, Romero, not the piccolo Pete.”
― Elizabeth Reyes, quote from Forever Mine


“He said… he said he wants you to know that those we love are never really gone.” Michael closes his eyes. “We may not get to see them like we used to, and we may not even remember what they sound like, but they will always be with us.”
― T.J. Klune, quote from Into This River I Drown


Interesting books

Auguries of Innocence
(135)
Auguries of Innocenc...
by William Blake
The Terrible Two Get Worse
(1.1K)
The Terrible Two Get...
by Mac Barnett
The Metamorphoses
(50.6K)
The Metamorphoses
by Ovid
Waistcoats & Weaponry
(14.1K)
Waistcoats & Weaponr...
by Gail Carriger
The Velveteen Rabbit
(194.9K)
The Velveteen Rabbit
by Margery Williams Bianco
How To Talk To A Widower
(12.6K)
How To Talk To A Wid...
by Jonathan Tropper

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.