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I should have bailed. That little voice had my back. That little voice is older than I am. It’s older than the oldest person who ever lived.
How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.
It’s hard to plan for what comes next when what comes next is not something you planned for.
Unless you grew up on top of a mountain or lived in a cave your whole life, the Hum was always around you. That’s what life was. It was the sea we swam in. The constant sound of all the things we built to make life easy and a little less boring. The mechanical song. The electronic symphony. The Hum of all our things and all of us. Gone. This is the sound of the Earth before we conquered it.
He lied the way a parent lies to you, the good lie that helps you go to sleep.
Sometimes you say things to your fear—things like It doesn’t matter, the words acting like pats on the head of a hyper dog.
You know how sometimes you tell yourself that you have a choice, but really you don’t have a choice? Just because there are alternatives doesn’t mean they apply to you.
And it occurs to me that there’s no real difference between us, the living and the dead; it’s just a matter of tense: past-dead and future-dead.
If the enemy looks just like you, how do you fight him?
“There’s a quote from Stalin,” he says. “‘A single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.’ Can you imagine seven billion of anything?
“So I don’t think about the 6.98 billion people. I think about just two.”
“We’re all dead, son. Some of us are just a little further along than others.
“God doesn’t call the equipped, son. God equips the called. And you have been called.”
Even the most sensitive person can get used to even the most insensitive thing. Cruelty isn’t a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit.
A moment comes in war when the last line must be crossed. The line that separates what you hold dear from what total war demands.
I walked around with a huge chip on my shoulder, angry at the world for being what the world was, for what it had always been: a dangerous place that our human noise had made seem a whole lot safer.
“I think that’s the way it is,” he says after a minute. “When you love someone. Something happens to them, and it’s a punch in the heart. Not like a punch in the heart; a real punch in the heart.”
By killing us, they showed us the idiocy of stuff. The guy who owned this BMW? He’s in the same place as the woman who owned that Kia.
There’s an old saying about the truth setting you free. Don’t buy it. Sometimes the truth slams the cell door shut and throws a thousand bolts.
In my tent I cried for myself and the silly, stupid life that had been taken from me. Now I beg forgiveness from the infinite sea of upturned faces.
