Daniel Suarez

Her new boss was an undead automaton from hell, true. But, no job is perfect.

In all, his outfit required nearly two thousand man-years of research and development, eight barrels of oil, and sixteen patent and trademark infringement lawsuits. All so he could possess casual style. A style that, in logistical requirements, was comparable to fielding a nineteenth-century military brigade. But he looked good. Casual.

Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza with roommates knows that Communism cannot ever work. If Lenin and Marx had just shard an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared and put to productive use making sneakers and office furniture.

He was just an idea - a collection of responsibilities with a mailing address.

Democracy requires active participation, and sooner or later someone ‘offers’ to take all the difficult decision-making away from you and your hectic life. But the darknet throws those decisions back onto you. It hard-codes democracy into the DNA of civilization. You upvote and downvote many times a day on things that directly affect your life and the lives of people around you—not just once every few years on things you haven’t got a chance in hell of affecting.

When people become more reliant on multinational corporations than on their own communities, they surrendered whatever say they had in their government. Corporations are growing stronger while democratic government becomes increasingly helpless.

Philip Pullman

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.

You cannot change what you are, only what you do.

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.

People are too complicated to have simple labels.

All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.

As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents.

I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.

Robert Charles Wilson

There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. Its hard to live in all those kinds of times. Easy to forget that you live in all of them.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters.

Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.

But the world is what it is and won’t be bargained with.

What a person runs from and what a person runs to aren't always as different as we hope.

Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be settled by the storm.

Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn't know one another very well.

Alastair Reynolds

A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.

I think I've reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level.

You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.

It’s the people who don’t worry—those who never have any doubts that what they’re doing is good and right—they’re the ones that cause the problems.

As the old saying went, the Manhattan Project wasn't built in a day. Or was that Rome? Something to do with Earth, anyway.

Enjoy it, kid. Enjoy feeling that you can make a difference.' Floyd flashed him a smile. 'It won't last for ever.

Life is precious. Infinitely so. Perhaps it takes a machine intelligence to appreciate that.

Do you have to sound so damned indifferent to it all? Here we are talking about how we're likely to be dead in a few hours and you're acting like it's only a minor inconvenience.

History is what we write, not what we remember. Why should we tarnish the memory of our planet by enshrining our less then noble deeds?

Michael Connelly

There is nothing you can do about the past except keep it there.

What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe.

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.

I view people two ways. They're either eye-for-an-eye people or they are turn-the-cheek people.

You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

What is jealousy but a reflection of your own failures?

I've learned over the years that sometimes if you ask the same question more than once you get different responses.

There were a billion lights out there on the horizon and I knew that all of them put together weren't enough to light the darkness in the hearts of some men.

The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers' bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.

Karl Marlantes

It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn't know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about.

Victory in combat is like sex with a prostitute. For a moment you forget everything in the sudden physical rush, but then you have to pay your money to the woman showing you the door. You see the dirt on the walls and your sorry image in the mirror.

He lay before God as a woman opens herself to a man, with legs apart, stomach exposed, arms open. But unlike some women, he did not have the inner strength that allowed them to do such a thing without fear. There was no woman’s strength in Mellas at all.

The chanting went on, the musicians giving in to the rhythm of their own being, finding healing in touching that rhythm, and healing in chanting about death, the only real god they knew.

War is society's dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults.

Over time, continual bad news will discourage any civilian population, and Americans had the lowest tolerance on the planet for bad news.

Cynicism is no more mature than naïveté. You're no more mature, just more burned.

Anthony Powell

Books do furnish a room.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.

I get a warm feeling among my books.

One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.

Trevanian

Irony is Fate's most common figure of speech.

In seeming contradiction of physical laws, time is heavy only when it is empty.

Generalization is flawed thinking only when applied to individuals. It is the most accurate way to describe the mass, the Wad. And yours is a democracy, a dictatorship of the Wad.

Hana: What on Earth is a 'barbeque'? Hel: A primitive tribal ritual featuring paper plates, elbows, flying insects, encrusted meat, hush puppies, and beer. Hana: I daren't ask what a 'hush puppy' is. Hel: Don't.

Ripe for romance? Is that not only the self-conscious and sensitive young man's way of saying he was heavy with passion? Is not, perhaps, romance only the fiction by means of which the tender-minded negotiate their lust?

Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting.

It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called 'American' only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. It's symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experiences. In the later stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun.

Nelson DeMille

The problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you are finished.

Basically, all women are nurturers and healers, and all men are mental patients to varying degrees.

It occurred to me that the problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you are finished.

A lot of our perception of history is influenced by inaccurate movies.

Women need a reason to have sex; men need only a place.

It's really scary when you have a moment of temporary sanity.

The meaning of life has not much to do with good and evil, right and wrong, duty, honor, country, or any of that. It has to do with cutting the right deal.

Panic---a deep abiding, free-floating anxiety, often without any reason or logical basis.

The window on the right featured contemporary bestselling authors like Brad Meltzer, James Patterson, David Baldacci, Nelson DeMille, and others who make more money writing about what I do than I make doing what I do.

Patrick Rothfuss

There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers.

When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind

You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way.

Call a jack a jack. Call a spade a spade. But always call a whore a lady. Their lives are hard enough, and it never hurts to be polite.

We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be.