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She didn’t need to be stronger than him, though. Just stronger than the little bones in his wrist and elbow.
Science had given mankind many gifts, and she valued it. But the one important thing it had taken away was the value of subjective, personal experience.
The problem with living with miracles was that they made everything seem plausible.
Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave.
It was a lesson he’d never forgotten. That humans only have so much emotional energy. No matter how intense the situation, or how powerful the feelings, it was impossible to maintain a heightened emotional state forever. Eventually you’d just get tired and want it to end.
“History is made up of people recovering from the last disaster,”
But the devil has always lived in men when they reach too far, when they fail to ask if they should do something just because they can do it.
Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it.
Heroism is a label most people get for doing shit they’d never do if they were really thinking about it.”
People are calling the aliens evil, because they hurt us. And without context, how do we know?”
The tragedy and the loss and the sense of wonder changes what it means to be human.
In her experience, most strong-willed men had equally strong-willed mothers, and she knew how to hit some of the same buttons.
There was a place for detailed Bible scholarship. There was even a place for it in front of the congregation. But it wasn’t what people came to church for. Learning a bit more about God was part of feeling closer and more connected to Him, and the closeness was what mattered. So Anna’s sermons now tended to be just a page or two of notes, and a lot more speaking from the heart.
Violence is what people do when they run out of good ideas. It’s attractive because it’s simple, it’s direct, it’s almost always available as an option.
But what you’re doing is demonizing them, making them the enemy. The problem with that is that once we’ve stopped them and they can’t hurt us anymore, they’re still demons. Still the enemy.”
Anna pointed at the people getting ready in the room around them. “How many will be dead by the end of today?” “There’s no way to know,” Monica said. “We owe it to them to look for other answers. We’ve failed this time. We’ve run out of ideas, and now we’re reaching for the gun. But maybe next time, if we’ve thought about what led us here, maybe next time we find a different answer. Certainty doesn’t have a place in violence.”
There’s a difference between tragedy and evil, and I am that difference.
When he thought back to the man he’d been before the death of the Cant, he remembered a man filled with righteous certainty. Right was right, wrong was wrong, you drew the lines thus and so. His time with Miller had stripped him of some of that. His time working for Fred Johnson had, if not removed, then filed down what remained. A sort of creeping nihilism had taken its place.
