Split Second Quotes

“this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.” —Robert Pirsig”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Presidents could be fickle and arbitrary. Each new one with wildly different visions and priorities. And when all was said and done, they were nothing more than civilians who managed to get donors excited enough to give them money, and then win a popularity contest. They weren’t the smartest or best trained that humanity had to offer, and they didn’t have the best judgment. The truly brilliant, truly gifted, wanted little to do with politics.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“We’re the needle on a record player. We stay in an infinitesimally thin band we call now, while the past and future are continually unreachable on either side. At least until the future decides to intersect with our infinitesimally thin needle and play a note.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Spilling blood to protect the homeland was one thing. But spilling blood, only to then vacate hard-won gains on a whim and leave a vacuum that ended up making the problem far worse, was another.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Einstein once quipped that time’s only purpose was to make sure that everything didn’t happen at once.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“But I begin to wonder if he also doesn’t have a demented sense of humor, and thinks it’s fun to throw wild shit our way.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“And then it sends a signal to turn off the system.” “So the universe with the wallet in the chamber waiting to be sent still exists,” added Allen. “But the universe from which it is actually sent never does.”  “That is just so messed up,” said Blake in exasperation, and Jenna, Walsh, and Soyer nodded their agreement. “Here is my advice to all of you,” said Cargill. “The best thing to do is ignore time travel, and don’t think about the paradoxes too hard. If you do, your head really will explode,” he added with a wry smile. “Just think of it as duplication and teleportation. But always keep in mind that the universe seems to go out of its way to ensure that infinite alternate timelines aren’t allowed. So no matter what, we only ever get this one universe.” He sighed. “So we’d better make sure we don’t screw it up.”     48   Brian Hamilton hated Cheyenne Mountain. Sure, it was one of the most interesting places in the world to visit, but living there only worked if you were a bat. The Palomar facility had also been underground, but nothing like this. It had a much larger security perimeter, so trips to the surface were easier to make happen. Not that it really mattered. Soon enough he would be traveling on another assignment anyway, living in a hotel room somewhere. But what he really wanted was to work side by side with Edgar Knight, toward their common goal. He was tired of being Knight’s designated spy, having to watch Lee Cargill squander Q5’s vast resources and capabilities. Watching him crawl like a wounded baby when he could be soaring. Cargill was an idiot. He could transform the world, but he was too weak to do it. He could wipe out the asshole terrorists who wanted nothing more than to butcher the helpless. If you have the ultimate cure for cancer, you use it to wipe out the disease once and for all. You don’t wield your cure only as a last resort, when the cancer has all but choked the life out of you. Edgar Knight, on the other hand, was a man with vision. He was able to make the tough decisions. If you were captain of a life raft with a maximum capacity of ten people, choosing to take five passengers of a sinking ship on board was an easy decision, not a heroic one. But what about when there were fifty passengers? Was it heroic to take them all, dooming everyone to death? Or was the heroic move using force, if necessary, to limit this number, to ensure some would survive? Sure, from the outside this looked coldhearted, while the converse seemed compassionate. But watching the world circle the drain because you were too much of a pussy to make the hard decisions was the real crime. Survival of the fittest was harsh reality. In the animal kingdom it was eat or be eaten. If you saw a group of fuck-nuts just itching to nuke the world back into the Dark Ages—who believed the Messiah equivalent, the twelfth Imam, would only come out to play when Israel was destroyed, and worldwide Armageddon unleashed—you wiped them out. To a man. Or else they’d do the same to you. It had been three days since Cargill had reported that he was on the verge of acquiring Jenna Morrison and Aaron Blake.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“But this didn’t stop him from fantasizing about her. It never ceased to amaze him the power of the sex drive. No matter how intelligent and rational a person was otherwise, the sex drive was controlled by more primitive regions, and could turn the most brilliant man on Earth into an animal, flirting with disaster in pursuit of physical gratification, even when he knew in his rational mind that this was nothing but a trick played on him by his incorrigible limbic system.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“And sometimes a less common word needs to be used to convey a nuance, or achieve a necessary level of precision. But if something can be said simply, it should be. Using big words isn’t impressive. Getting points across simply, succinctly, but with great clarity is.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“The moral: the dimwitted and impulsive might not be able to hold a job or learn algebra, but they sure knew how to screw each other—and reproduce like crazy. The movie took place many generations in the future, after which this reverse evolution had run its inevitable course, resulting in a society largely composed of morons.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“I hate to keep treating the universe like it is a living being, but the way I think of it is that the universe wants to deal with changes in time in the most efficient way possible. And it wants to maintain a single timeline, as infinite timelines aren’t very efficient.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“And Internet is incoming only,” continued Knight. “Brain Trust scientists, and others on this island, can enter terms into a Google search bar, but that’s the only way they can interact with the outside world. The results of their searches can be opened and downloaded, but it’s one-way traffic only.” He smiled. “None of this was easy to do, but it is quite foolproof.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics, we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.” ​—David Deutsch (Oxford Physicist who laid the foundations for quantum computing) “Technology . . . is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.” ​—Carrie Snow “Beam me up, Scotty. There is no intelligent life on this planet.” ​—Unknown (often printed on T-shirts)”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Richard Kemp, commander of British forces in Afghanistan, had written in a formal report that, “The Taliban’s use of women to shield gunmen as they engage NATO forces is now so normal it is deemed barely worthy of comment.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“This was contrasted with a scene in which two prissy, high-IQ professionals were discussing having children. They both agreed that having children was an important decision and that they needed to wait for the right time, since child bearing wasn’t something that should be rushed into. Ultimately, they died childless. The moral: the dimwitted and impulsive might not be able to hold a job or learn algebra, but they sure knew how to screw each other—and reproduce like crazy.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Why? For lack of anything else to do with their time. Because they were impulsive and not bright enough to even understand the importance of birth control. And because the more kids they had, the bigger the welfare checks and food stamp handouts they received.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“The universe would rather live with paradox than infinite timelines,”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Blake set his phone to speaker, audio-only, and had Myla tie it into the microphone and sound system of the motel’s television set. This way, he and Jenna could speak normally in the direction of the television and their voices would be picked up easily, and all three in the room could hear and see audio or video coming from whoever answered.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Through space-time, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. When you’re not moving at all in space, you’re moving at the speed of light, so to speak, through time—the fastest the universe allows you to do so. When you’re moving at the speed of light through space, you stop moving through time.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Jenna carefully removed the tiny stick, roughly the size of her thumb, not surprisingly, since these storage units were also commonly referred to as thumb drives. These devices could have been downsized further, but the tinier an object the easier it was to lose, so this size had become fairly standard.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“The need for sleep could be a terrible burden, but she was glad sleep existed. If it didn’t, one would never get any real downtime. This way, no matter what happened the night before, you could wake up and feel like you had a new lease on life, a clean slate, that a chapter had ended and a new one had begun.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“but with a man whose entire body was paralyzed. Well, all except for his penis, which enabled them to have three children, although the thought picture of how this was accomplished wasn’t something on which she liked to dwell.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Don’t get me wrong,” continued Jenna, “I have nothing against people with good working vocabularies. I’d like to think I have one. And sometimes a less common word needs to be used to convey a nuance, or achieve a necessary level of precision. But if something can be said simply, it should be. Using big words isn’t impressive. Getting points across simply, succinctly, but with great clarity is.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“sometimes a less common word needs to be used to convey a nuance, or achieve a necessary level of precision. But if something can be said simply, it should be. Using big words isn’t impressive. Getting points across simply, succinctly, but with great clarity is.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Jenna Morrison kissed her sister, Amber, goodbye, ignoring the shrieks of tiny Sophia, who was swaddled so completely in a baby blanket that her actual presence could not be confirmed by eye, as though she had fallen into a cottony-soft, mint-green black hole.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“satisfaction. “I’m going to be very busy.” * * * Blake and Wexler traveled to the fifth floor, one of those that was no longer subject to video coverage. The doors opened and a member of security appeared two feet away, facing them as though he had been waiting for the elevator. Blake and the man raised their guns at the exact same time and stopped, both with their weapons now trained point-blank at the other’s head. Neither took their eyes off the other, or even blinked, and both ignored Nathan Wexler completely. “Looks like we have a standoff,” said the man, still staring at Blake with the intensity of a predatory cat. Blake pulled the trigger and the man’s head almost exploded from his shoulders. His body fell to”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“It never ceased to amaze him the power of the sex drive. No matter how intelligent and rational a person was otherwise, the sex drive was controlled by more primitive regions, and could turn the most brilliant man on Earth into an animal, flirting with disaster in pursuit of physical gratification, even when he knew in his rational mind that this was nothing but a trick played on him by his incorrigible limbic system. Walsh”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Hiding one’s head in the sand and ignoring reality wasn’t going to make the problem go away. And it was maddening how often the civilized world allowed itself to be duped by barbarians with no ethics or morals. By savages who would do anything for their cause. Literally, anything. They placed no value on human life, and no act, no matter how savage or despicable, was off limits, including genocide. Many”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Knight sighed loudly. “I know most people believe everything the government does, especially within Black Ops, is all about war mongering, for military uses only. But this isn’t true. Yes, the military gets first dibs and can elect to keep findings secret for a time, but many of the greatest tech advances in history came about as military projects that were initially covert. Secret”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second

“Presidents could be fickle and arbitrary. Each new one with wildly different visions and priorities. And when all was said and done, they were nothing more than civilians who managed to get donors excited enough to give them money, and then win a popularity contest. They weren’t the smartest or best trained that humanity had to offer, and they didn’t have the best judgment. The truly brilliant, truly gifted, wanted little to do with politics. Cargill”
― Douglas E. Richards, Split Second