Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse Quotes

“When you understand that every opinion is a vision loaded with personal history, you will start to understand that all judgment is a confession.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“We bombed children in Dresden. We napalmed little kids in Vietnam, burning their clothes off and leaving them running naked through rice paddies, screaming for mercy. We bombed weddings in Afghanistan. We watched as Israel bombed children in hospitals. On and on it goes.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“Crumpled silver suits lie scattered around the inside of the dome. They’re children, and that breaks her heart. Not one of them moves or so much as twitches. If they did, Alice would run to their aid, but there’s nothing she can do for the dead—nothing but weep.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“And beyond those genetic traits, you’re defined by your society. Your culture is the stage upon which your actions unfold. Your parents, your friends, your pastors, your teachers—they’ve molded you, shaped you, squeezed you. There’s hardly a conviction you can call your own.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“Alice feels for Uncle Phil. She’s got uncles and aunts of her own who are facsimiles of him. It’s both sad and frustrating to see them beyond the reach of reason.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“All we have is now,” Alice says. “That’s what Funk Meister’s taught me.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“There’s something utterly surreal about eating chocolate in the middle of the alien apocalypse. It’s uncomfortably casual.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“Only lies can change facts, not opinions.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“Indignation is no basis for moral standing.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“He doesn’t actually want answers. He wants to be outraged. He wants to be heard. Were she to interject with an observation, he’d go off on a tangent. Beliefs need to be justified, not challenged—and certainly not changed.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“Intimidation has long replaced debate in US politics.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“Life should be more than a placeholder before death.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“Consciousness arose as an alternative to instinct,” Alice says. “Life on Earth evolved over billions of years. Across that immense depth of time, life explored different strategies to survive. Reacting to shadows helped simple organisms avoid predators, but those shadows could come from clouds or trees. Acting on an impulse wasted energy. And so instinct evolved. Instincts encoded complex behaviors, like reacting to some shadows but not others. Instinct alone, though, wasn’t enough. To thrive, animals needed to understand motives—their own motives and the motives of others within their species and without. They needed to understand how to act in complex scenarios that defied impulse and instinct. Consciousness solved that problem. Reactions could be moderated by experience, by thinking, by feeling, by experimenting, by learning, by existing.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“What was it Arthur C. Clarke once said? “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” or the divine power of the Almighty, but the reality is that these aliens need to balance their resources like anyone else. They can’t just throw infinite resources around because they don’t have an infinite supply of energy. The blimps and domes exist for the same reason they enslaved the kids—they’re economical.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“Omnia Vincit Amor.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“No one gets to relive even a single moment of their lives, which is a shame, as it would be nice to do things differently from time to time.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“What do I want? I’m tired. I want to go to sleep… that’s the thing about us dumb humans. We eat and drink, piss and shit, and spend a third of our lives unconscious—and we goddamn well love it!”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“Indifference is what allows evil to flourish. Without indifference, evil is impotent.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“After the lecture, Alice caught up with Lisa for dinner, and they’ve been sitting in the beer garden ever since, although calling the concrete courtyard a garden is a stretch of the imagination. Live music plays in forty-five-minute sets. As enjoyable as it is, they can’t talk beyond halting sentences until the breaks.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“No one can convince anyone of anything they don’t already inherently want to believe. Questioning beliefs is intellectual suicide, or so it feels. Emotions are more important than facts. No one has ever been persuaded by logic: they either want to learn, change and grow, or they don’t, and that desire determines how they respond, not logic.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“Social media is a drug. Right or wrong isn’t important. Like crows stealing silver earrings, people are drawn to the sensational. Outrage is all that matters. Change is to be feared.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“German chocolate cake. It’s not German.” “Of course it is. It’s right there in the name.” “It’s American,” Alice says. “German chocolate cake is from Massachusetts.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“They’re Polish,” Alice says. “Okay, Poland’s got Jews.” “They were baked for Lent, which is rather notably a Catholic tradition—not Jewish.” “So bagels are Catholic?” “Nope,” Alice replies. “They came from Italy, where bakers would form bread dough into thick rings and boil rather than bake them.” “So they’re Italian?” “Nope,” Alice replies yet again, and Lisa laughs, shaking her head. “How did I know that was coming? All right, smartass. Where do bagels come from?” “The Italians got them from the Arabs.” “The Arabs? Seriously??? Jewish bagels are actually Arabic?” “Yep. They were called ka’ak back in the 10th century. And this is the problem. We take things at face value. We assume so much, we lose sight of reality.”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse

“Alice follows a bunch of astrophysicists on Twitter who, like her, refuse to call it X. After all, X is not a name—it’s a letter. What’s next? Some other billionaire playboy buys Instagram and calls it I or Q?”
― Peter Cawdron, Love, Sex and the Alien Apocalypse