The End of All Things (Old Man's War, #6)

by John Scalzi

Lots of things can be more important than money when you lacked other options.

But who the actual fuck can’t taste their own mouth?

If you’re going to take the time to get rid of my body, then maybe take the time to create a control metaphor that takes advantage of not being limited to a human body anymore.

It’s not exactly surprising that staying sane is useful when trying to hit performance markers.

I knew he was done when he said “But I must be boring you” to me, which is narcissist-speak for “Now I’m bored.”

“Of course,” he said, and then his face got a look. I thought it resembled what the face of someone who felt guilty about something, but didn’t actually want to be troubled by doing anything to deal with that guilt, might look like.

What I and the general had underestimated were the number of other assembly members who would willingly continue to follow a fool.

“The Gods should protect us from such faithfulness,” it said.

corporation that was not actually the government of the Earth, but which pretended to be for situations like this.

“It’s easier to be the aspirational leader when the thing you’re building doesn’t exist. But now it exists, and you’re not aspirational anymore. Now you’re just the chief bureaucrat. Bureaucrats don’t inspire awe.”

“I do have a sense of adventure,” I said. “It’s overawed by my sense of self-preservation.”

it was designed to operate with minimal assistance from humans, who were without exception the moving part most likely to fail.

There’s a saying: “May you live in interesting times.” To begin, it’s a curse. “Interesting” in this case uniformly means “Oh god, death is raining down upon us and we shall all perish wailing and possibly on fire.” If someone wanted to say something nice to you, they wouldn’t tell you to live in “interesting” times. They would say something like, “I wish you eternal happiness” or “May you have peace” or “Live long and prosper” and so on. They wouldn’t say “Live in interesting times.” If someone is telling you to live in interesting times, they are basically telling you they want you to die horribly, and to suffer terribly before you do.

“Captain, the problem is not that I’m paranoid. The problem is that the universe keeps justifying my paranoia.”

“But I have always found that there’s an inverse relationship between the number of people in a room and the amount of useful work that can be done.

“And so we learn how simple it is to change the history of the universe,” Sorvalh said. “All you need is for every other thing to have gone so horribly wrong first.”