Michael Willems > Michael's Quotes

“You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker”
― Malcom X

“History will not let us forget: it wears disguises, reintroduces itself to us, claims it is someone new and wonderful. But let us not forget.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“...In books there's always somebody standing by ready to say hey, the world's in danger, evil's on the rise, but if you're really quick and take this ring and put it in that volcano over there everything will be fine.

"But in real life that guy never turns up. He's never there. He's busy handing out advice in the next universe over. In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't. There's no answers in the back of the book.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“Looking back through history, there are a lot more men who thought they were Alexander the Great than men who actually were.”
― James S.A. Corey, Nemesis Games

“But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them—even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“This is as good as it gets. Can’t expect everyone to be on the same page. We’re still humans after all. Some percentage of us are always going to be assholes.”
― James S.A. Corey, Nemesis Games

“Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes

“She was too tired to feel anything more, she wanted a book to do to her what books did: take away the world, slide it aside for a little bit, and let her please, please just be somewhere and somebody else”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere though of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or rabbit doesn't behave like that. Take birds -- in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they won't mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.

As a species were doomed by hope, then?

You could call it hope. That, or desperation.

But we're doomed without hope, as well, said Jimmy.

Only as individuals, said Crake cheerfully.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“If he wants to be an asshole, it's a free country. Millions before him have made the same life choice.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“Jimmy, look at it realistically. You can't couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinitely. Homo sapiens doesn't seem to be able to cut himself off at the supply end. He's one of the few species that doesn't limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words - and up to a point, of course - the less we eat, the more we fuck."

"How to do you account for that?" said Jimmy

"Imagination," said Crake. "Men can imagine their own deaths...human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else...and live on forever.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“Dariusz felt something like admiration for the Red Knight. They clearly read the same books.”
― Miles Cameron, The Fell Sword

“So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects.”
― Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

“I wanted to just sink into my media downloads for a while and pretend I didn't exist.”
― Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

“Our species doesn’t operate by reality. It operates by stories. Cities are a story. Money is a story. Space was a story, once. A king tells us a story about who we are and why we’re great, and that story is enough to make us go kill people who tell a different story. Or maybe the people kill the king because they don’t like his story and have begun to tell themselves a different one.”
― Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few

“And if we were meant only to labor, why give us minds, why give us desires? Why can we not be as cattle in the field, or chickens in their coops?”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs