Mate, it ain’t violence if it’s religion.
You are whatever you want to be, Wayne. You’re the wind. You’re the stars. You are all endless things.
In short, Tress was a normal teenage girl. She knew this because the other girls often mentioned how they weren’t like “everyone else,” and after a while Tress figured that the group “everyone else” must include only her. The other girls were obviously right, as they all knew how to be unique – they were so good at it, in fact, that they did it together.
I’m a collection of stories stuffed into a brain with no context, trying so very hard to simply keep going.
A prisoner could be convinced that they lived in a paradise, if the prison was pretty enough.
But I still wondered: if we didn’t matter as individuals, then what were we saving the group for?
You’re meant to be helping people.
A boring truth will always have difficulty competing with an exciting lie.
Lem nodded. “It is. But a terrible idea executed brilliantly has to be better than a brilliant idea executed terribly. I mean, look at pelicans.
We always pretend the ideals and culture of the past have aged like wine, but in truth, the ideas of the past tend to age more like biscuits. They simply get stale.
She wasn’t even certain she was Tress anymore, or if she’d become someone else. You could say, in other words, that her state at the moment was distress.
Beyond that, memories have a way of changing on us. Souring or sweetening over time – like a brew we drink, then recreate later by taste, only getting the ingredients mostly right. You can’t taste a memory without tainting it with who you have become.
Men often described the girl as having hair the color of wheat. Others called it the color of caramel, or occasionally the color of honey. The girl wondered why men so often used food to describe women’s features. There was a hunger to such men that was best avoided.
Okay, I could deal with this. I could accept this. Deal with this, brain!
Heroism is often the seemingly spontaneous result of a lifetime of preparation.
You cannot be defined by your questions. Only by what you do with them.
See? One step at a time. You can do this. I can do this. Whatever it takes.” He nodded by wobbling his drone up and down. “Okay!” he said. “Whatever it takes. My! That feels good. To at least pretend we’re in control! I like it. Is this how you feel all the time?
Spensa,” M-Bot said, hovering along beside me, “I am not enthused by my first experiments in self-determination. My chronometer details that since my awakening, I’ve spent a frightening amount of my time lost, pouting, or being chased by interdimensional monsters.
Get better. Learn to accept that sometimes what you feel isn’t invalid, but that it doesn’t mean you have to act according to those feelings either.
However,” he continued, “duty should not be accepted without question. Duty can be a motive, but should not be an excuse.