Bat Cat > Bat's Quotes

“Yet for all the aggravation of tending them, it was not so terrible an ordeal. He’d never kept a pet before and keeping close to fifty of them all at once in the wildlands was not how any man ought to begin, but he seemed to be having some success at it and he had to admit, he liked having someone to talk to, even if she couldn’t talk back.”
― R. Lee Smith, The Last Hour of Gann

“if you throw a man in a cage, he will spend the rest of his life fighting to escape. But if you tell him no one else in the world gets the cage but him, dress it up and throw in a few pillows, then he’ll walk in on his own.”
― R. Lee Smith, The Last Hour of Gann

“Jesus Christ, really? How did you ever survive living with me as long as you did without having sex every other hour?” “With God’s aid alone,” he said seriously. “It was a terrible time.”
― R. Lee Smith, The Last Hour of Gann

“A bad book begins and ends with the words on the pages. A good book gives you the feeling that it began long before you ever started reading. But a great book goes on long after you stop.”
― R. Lee Smith quoting her mother

“Men may perish, but the world will neither celebrate nor mourn. It will go on.' His smile thinned. 'Would you like to know how?'
'No.'
'Animals will swell to fill the void left by men," he told her. 'And over-swell it, perhaps. There will be other extinctions and other recoveries. The sky will clear, but those who see it will not marvel at its many colors. Those ruins will collapse, burying treasures like this-' He waved at the walls. '-and this-' He picked up the spoon from her coffee tray and tossed it down again with a clatter. '-forever, but the world will go on. Years become centuries so easily when no one is there to count them. Centuries become millennia. The forests will reclaim the lands that Men have razed. Rivers will carve canyons across the scars left by this fallen cities. Mountains will rise up, trapping seas to dry under and uncaring sun and leaving the bones of whales to bleach in the newborn deserts for no one to find, no one to be inspired by thoughts of giants and dragons. And still the worlds will go on, and I will go on with it through ages that can only be measured by the coming and going of glaciers. The stars themselves will shift in the heavens and no one will be there to invent names for their new alignments or remember the stories of the old ones, no one but me. In time, the sun itself will begin to cool. Here on Earth, the world goes on and on as its remaining life passes through its last changes and dies away. It will be quiet. And lonely.' His mouth curved into a bitter line. 'But I'll live.'
'Stop it,' Lan whispered through numb lips.
'I read once that the sun will someday swell and engulf this world before it burns itself out. Perhaps I will finally die with it. Or perhaps I' will continue to endure... my ashes pulled eternally apart through the frozen vacuum of space, and I with no more mouth to scream... still alive.”
― R. Lee Smith, Land of the Beautiful Dead

“Damn you! Hear me now and hear me well. If you die, I will raze your Norwood. I will raze all of them--every village every waystation, every wall. I will make the whole of this world your grave. Do you hear me? How could you do this to me? How could you dare? Answer me!”
― R. Lee Smith, Land of the Beautiful Dead

“You can make a story mean anything Meoraq. But that's the think with you religious people, isn't it? God is this glorious intangibility, so no proof becomes proof just by how you spin it.”
― R. Lee Smith, The Last Hour of Gann

“I'm not enjoying this-"
"Lies! You'd fuck this moment if you could!”
― R. Lee Smith, The Last Hour of Gann

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“The human race might be about to disappear, but not before putting on a two-year frenzy of recreational sex.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

“This was governed entirely by Newtonian mechanics. Each piece of the moon attracted every other piece more or less strongly depending on its mass and its distance. It could be simulated on a computer quite easily. The whole rubble cloud was gravitationally bound. Any shrapnel fast enough to escape had done so already. The rest was drifting around in a loose huddle of rocks. Sometimes they banged into one another. Eventually they would stick together and the moon would begin to re-form.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

“Limitations foster creativity. Tell an artist to paint anything, and he may struggle, but tell him to create something specific, in a set amount of time, for a certain audience, and these constraints might well push him to produce something he might never have come up with on his own. We grow and evolve by testing ourselves. That’s my personal philosophy.”
― wildbow, Worm

“Nature of a compromise is that it leaves everyone more or less equally unhappy.”
― wildbow, Worm

“It’s for love, in the end. Pettiest of all pursuits. Arrogance, greed, even revenge… they’re nobler, trust me. I’ve walked all those roads. But love? It twists all the other things. Makes you misstep, makes you irrational, makes you impatient, above all.”
― wildbow, Worm

“That’s the funny thing about pity, Saint. It’s condescending by default.”
― wildbow, Worm

“Everyone likes the manipulative assholes after they’ve had a chance to do their manipulating.”
― wildbow, Worm

“…And you’re acting like I should be able to read something in your silence. The problem is that speech needs periods of silence to be intelligible, to separate the words and keep it from being a steady drone of noise. To frame it. The opposite is true. To find the meaning in what’s left unsaid, we need words to punctuate it.”
― wildbow, Worm

“So you’re following orders,” I said. “That’s the worst and scariest excuse in the world, really.”
― wildbow, Worm

“According to studies, clinically depressed individuals have a more accurate grasp of reality than the average person. We tell ourselves lies and layer falsehoods and self-assurances over one another in order to cope with a world colored by pain and suffering. We put blinders on. If we lose that illusion, we crumble into depression or we crack and go mad. So perhaps I’m crazy, but only because I see things too clearly?”
― wildbow, Worm

“Threats is the wrong word,” she said. “But English is a limited language in some ways. There’s really no word to articulate what I mean. A threat with a measure of inevitability to it. A promise? Too feeble. People break promises too often. A curse? A malediction? Too… magical. An oath? The connotations are wrong. When I say I’ll do something, I make it happen.”
― wildbow, Worm

“Things become a great deal easier once you realize how temporary it all is.”
― wildbow, Worm

“Do morals matter, if our alternative is a grim and hopeless end?”
― wildbow, Worm

“We are a wretched, petty species, and we have been given power to destroy ourselves with.”
― wildbow, Worm

“I don’t think humanity is noble,” I said. “Not in the least. It’s not just or fair on an intrinsic level. It’s not even good. But I kind of hoped we’d go out fighting the other guy.”
― wildbow, Worm

“As if family somehow made you better than someone else? The idea nettled Bitch. Life experience had taught her that it was all too often the opposite. People were assholes, people were monsters. The exceptions were all too rare. Far too many of those same people started a family just because they thought it was what they should do, and then they were assholes and monsters to a captive audience.”
― wildbow, Worm

“She had been forced by the rules her maker had imposed on her to sacrifice herself for the human.

It wasn’t that she wouldn’t have anyways. She just would have liked the choice. Making sacrifices and doing good deeds wasn’t actually good if you were forced to do them.”
― wildbow, Worm