Katrina > Katrina's Quotes

“Life is too short and love is too long.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

“I told myself I still looked like a SecUnit without armor, hopelessly exposed, but the truth was I did look more human. And now I knew why I hadn’t wanted to do this. It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person.”
― Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

“When a major character died in the twentieth episode I had to pause seven minutes while it sat there in the feed doing the bot equivalent of staring at a wall, pretending that it had to run diagnostics. Then four episodes later the character came back to life and it was so relieved we had to watch that episode three times before it would go on.”
― Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

“In the feed, ART started to play the soundtrack to Sanctuary Moon and weirdly, that helped.”
― Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

“I liked humans, I liked watching them on the entertainment feed, where they couldn’t interact with me.”
― Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

“So we watched Worldhoppers. It didn’t complain about the lack of realism. After three episodes, it got agitated whenever a minor character was killed. When a major character died in the twentieth episode I had to pause seven minutes while it sat there in the feed doing the bot equivalent of staring at a wall, pretending that it had to run diagnostics. Then four episodes later the character came back to life and it was so relieved we had to watch that episode three times before it would go on.

At the climax of one of the main story lines, the plot suggested the ship might be catastrophically damaged and members of the crew killed or injured, and the transport was afraid to watch it. (That’s obviously not how it phrased it, but yeah, it was afraid to watch it.) I was feeling a lot more charitable toward it by that point so was willing to let it ease into the episode by watching one to two minutes at a time.

After it was over, it just sat there, not even pretending to do diagnostics. It sat there for a full ten minutes, which is a lot of processing time for a bot that sophisticated. Then it said, Again, please.

So I started the first episode again.”
― Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

“It was giving me the etymology of the gesture as I sat down. You would think a SecUnit who had been shot to pieces multiple times, blown up, memory purged, and once partially dismantled by accident wouldn’t be on the verge of panic under these circumstances. You’d be wrong.”
― Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

“In my feed, ART turned down the soundtrack to say, Young humans can be impulsive. The trick is keeping them around long enough to become old humans.”
― Martha Wells, Artificial Condition

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

“I hate caring about stuff. But apparently once you start, you can't just stop.”
― Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol

“Or Miki was a bot who had never been abused or lied to or treated with anything but indulgent kindness. It really thought its humans were its friends, because that’s how they treated it. I signaled Miki I would be withdrawing for one minute. I needed to have an emotion in private.”
― Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol

“If you had to take care of humans, it was better to take care of small soft ones who were nice to you and thought you were great because you kept preventing them from being murdered.”
― Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol

“I was tired of pretending to be human. I needed a break.”
― Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol

“Pretending bad things aren’t happening is not a great survival strategy.”
― Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol

“A normal SecUnit (you know, one that still had its governor module, less anxious than me but probably more depressed”
― Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol

“I was having an emotion, and I hate that.”
― Martha Wells, Exit Strategy

“Possibly I was overthinking this. I do that; it’s the anxiety that comes with being a part-organic murderbot. The upside was paranoid attention to detail. The downside was also paranoid attention to detail.”
― Martha Wells, Exit Strategy

“Disinformation, which is the same as lying but for some reason has a different name, is the top tactic in corporate negotiation/warfare.”
― Martha Wells, Exit Strategy

“I was having an emotion, and I hate that. I’d rather have nice safe emotions about shows on the entertainment media; having them about things real-life humans said and did just led to stupid decisions”
― Martha Wells, Exit Strategy

“How humans decide what to do with their arms on a second by second basis, I still have no idea”
― Martha Wells, Exit Strategy

“an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth’s atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it—the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“What's different now from 1804 or 1904 is that tuberculosis is curable, and has been since the mid-1950s. We know how to live in a world without tuberculosis. But we choose not to live in that world.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“But of course it wasn’t over. Why would the future be simpler than the past? Stories never really ended, they just rolled one into the next. The past was never wholly lost, and the future was never quite found. We wander forever in a pathless forest, dropping with weariness, as home draws us back, and the grail draws us on, and we never arrive, and the quest never ends.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“Arthur’s secret was that when he was hardly more than a child they had handed him the whole world, and that world had a flaw in it, and the flaw was him. He was conceived in sin and deception and murder, and no matter how great a king he became, how passionately he pursued perfection and devoted himself to God, he could never change that. That was the catch, that was the cost, and he could never make it right. It was like one of those cursed wounds from the stories, that would never heal.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“Adventures were quick and exciting when you heard about them, but when you were inside one they happened very, very slowly.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“Years later he would discover that in Britain it was customary for a fourth son to carry the image of a swift on his shield, because a swift was a bird that was believed to have no feet and spent its entire life on the wing, never landing, from birth to death.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“He looked up at the empty clouds, and as he died he wondered, not for the first time but for the very last, why it should be that we are made for a bright world, but live in a dark one.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“God wouldn’t’ve sent him more than he could endure.” “I find your God is a great optimist when it comes to the question of how much people can endure.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

“Because all the characters in this story—like all of humanity, apparently—have a little blank spot in their heads that says, “Kings. What a good idea.” The idea is powerful, and seductive, and should not be underestimated. To be a civilization of any worth, however, means acknowledging the idea—and then condemning it as laughably, madly stupid. May we come to live in such a worthier world, and soon.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption