The Water Knife Quotes

“Pure data. You don’t believe data—you test data.” He grimaced. “If I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely fucked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like believe or disbelieve around.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“If we can’t describe our reality accurately, we can’t see it.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“People only really live when they’re about to die,” he said. “Before then it’s all a waste. You don’t appreciate how good it is until you’re really in the shit.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“if we don’t have the right words in our vocabularies, we can’t even see the things that are right in front of our faces.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“Some people had to bleed so other people could drink. Simple as that.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans -- vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“Lucy woke to the sound of rain. A benediction, gently pattering. For the first time in more than a year, her body relaxed. The release of tension was so sudden that for a moment she felt as if she were filled with helium. Weightless. All her sadness and horror sloughed off her frame like the skin of a snake, too confining and gritted and dry to contain her any longer, and she was rising. She was new and clean and lighter than air, and she sobbed with the release of it. And then she woke fully, and it wasn’t rain caressing the windows of her home but dust, and the weight of her life came crushing down upon her once again.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“There were stories in sweat.

The sweat of a woman bend double in an onion field, working fourteen hours under the hot sun, was different from the sweat of a man as he approached a checkpoint in Mexico, praying to La Santa Muerte that the federales weren't on the payroll of the enemies he was fleeing...
Sweat was a body's history, compressed into jewels, beaded on the brow, staining shirts with salt. It told you everything about how a person had ended up in the right place at the wrong time, and whether they would survive another day.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“Everything’s bad, until you find something worse.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“You didn’t judge people for caving under pressure; you judged them for those few times when they were lucky enough to have any choice at all.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“It was a view of the world that anticipated evil from people because people always delivered. And the worst part was that she couldn’t really argue.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“We knew it was all going to go to hell, and we just stood by and watched it happen anyway. There ought to be a prize for that kind of stupidity.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“Books on one shelf, a small collection of old titles. Isak Dinesen, bound in leather. Alice in Wonderland, in an old illustrated edition. The kind of things someone kept to show visitors how smart they were. Accessories to identity. But one book—a copy of Cadillac Desert, old. He reached for it. “Don’t,” she said. “It’s a signed first.” Angel smirked. “ ’Course it is.” Then: “My boss makes all her new hires read that. She likes us to see this mess isn’t an accident. We were headed straight to Hell, and didn’t do anything about it.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“..."Why are you so nice? It doesn't make sense. I'm not your woman. I'm not your people"
"We're all each other's people. Just like we're all our brothers' keepers. We forget it sometimes. When everything's going to pieces, people can forget. But in the end? We're all in it together..."
"I used to know this Indian guy... the thing he said that stuck with me was that people are one here in America. They're all alone. And they don't trust anyone except themselves, and they don't rely on anyone except themselves. He said that was why he thought India would survive all this apocalyptic shit, but America wouldn't. Because here, no knew their neighbors." He laughed at that. "I can still remember his head wagging back and forth, 'No one is knowing their neighbors.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“Lucy felt sick, listening to him. It was a view of the world that anticipated evil from people because people always delivered. And the worst part was that she couldn't really argue.
"Like there's something in our DNA," she murmured, 'that makes us into monsters."
"Yeah. And we're all the same monsters," Angel said. "And it's just accidents that turn us one way or another, but once we turn bad, it takes a long time for us to try to be something different.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“I don’t need books about how things used to be. Everybody talks about how things used to be. I need a book about how I’m supposed to live now. Unless you got a book like that, I don’t need the weight.” She”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“Start by loving, instead of needing.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“Sometimes you found a way to mesh up for a little while, maybe even spin the same direction, as he and Lucy had. Other times you couldn't find a fit. Sometimes you were the most important past in the machine.
And sometimes it turned out you were obsolete.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“So why run? If the whole world was burning, why not face it with a beer in your hand, unafraid?”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“Silence is what gets to me. All the things you don't say. All the words you don't write. That gets to you. After a while it just kills you. All the stories you teach yourself not to tell. All the truth and lies you never ever print because all of it is too dangerous.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“The desert never forgot itself. A thin fall of winter rain was all that kept yucca and creosote blooming. If there was other life, it cowered alongside the banks of the few capillary rivers that braved the blazing lands and never strayed far. The desert never took water for granted.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“I think the world is big, and we broke it." She shrugged. "Jaime used to go off on this all the time. How we saw what was coming and didn't do anything about it.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“It’s the first rule of bureaucracy: any message worth sending is worth sending in triplicate.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“...the thing he said that stuck with me was that people are alone here in America. They're all alone. And they don't trust anyone except themselves, and they don't rely on anyone except themselves. He said that was why he thought India would survive all this apocalyptic shit, but America wouldn't. Because here, no knew their neighbors.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“What have you got on Case that makes you so untouchable?" Braxton asked.
"She trusts me."
Braxton laughed, disbelieving, as Angel put the injunctions back in order.
Angel said, "People like you write everything down because you know everyone is a liar. It's how you lawyers do." He slapped Braxton in the chest with the legal documents, grinning. "And that's why Case trusts me and treats you like a dog - you're the one who writes things down.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“Desperate people did desperate things, became avatars of unexpected tragedy.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“the shock troops in Fallout”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“There's a theory that if we don't have the right words in our vocabularies, we can't even see the things that are right in front of our faces. If we can't describe our reality accurately, we can't see it. Not the other way around. ... Our own words make us blind.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“When people lost hope, they somet8mes lost their humanity too. Desperate people did desperate things, became avatars of unexpected tragedy.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“This was the true apocalypse. The world after all the rules had stopped existing.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife