Six Wakes Quotes

“Extremist individuals live inside every single group on the planet. Devout followers from Christian to Muslim who kill in the name of God, down to people who perpetuate a cycle of abuse from parent to child. And do you know at what point they’re labeled as terrorists?”
Martini said, “When the government—”
“When the news reports it. The news can take a starving refugee and make them into an invading migrant. One of my Black ancestors was photographed carrying diapers over his head after a flood. They called him a ‘looter.’ A white man was photographed doing the same thing. They called him a ‘survivor.”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes

“Politics is almost never violent toward the people who are actually making the political decisions.”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes

“Self-preservation is one of the signs of sentient life.”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes

“Get a degree in mechanical engineering, Hiro. Get a pilot’s license, Hiro. Learn meditation and hypnosis, Hiro. Slip your roommate out of prison, Hiro. Drive thousands of clones and humans around in space, Hiro. Sit on your butt for four hundred years, Hiro.’
That’s what they told me. Not once did they say, Get shot and chased and stabbed by crazed crewmates, Hiro!”
“To be fair, you were one of the people doing the chasing, crazed at the time too,” Maria said.
“Semantics,” he said.”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes

“I’m so sick of that argument. I’ve been hearing it for centuries. Playing God. Wolfgang, we played God when people believed they could dictate their baby’s gender by having sex in a certain position. We played God when we invented birth control, amniocentesis, cesarean sections, when we developed modern medicine and surgery. Flight is playing God. Fighting cancer is playing God. Contact lenses and glasses are playing God. Anything we do to modify our lives in a way that we were not born into is playing God. In vitro fertilization. Hormone replacement therapy. Gender reassignment surgery. Antibiotics.”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes

“One of my Black ancestors was photographed carrying diapers over his head after a flood. They called him a ‘looter.’ A white man was photographed doing the same thing. They called him a ‘survivor.”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes

“Paul lay in his room, letting the sick, glorious feeling of grease and carbohydrates carry him away. He wanted to think of nothing more than the feeling of his stomach, obscenely full for the first time ever.”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes

“Considering what bullets can do to spaceships, it’s probably good they didn’t give us guns,” Wolfgang said as he carefully stepped down another rung. “No, that’s not it,” Katrina said from above him. “The ship can withstand unavoidable pieces of space debris hit when we’re going hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. A bullet isn’t going to have that much force.” “Our tech can’t take a bullet, though,” he said. “Shoot one of those into a computer terminal and see how well we fly. Or breathe. Or eat.” “Point,” she said.”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes

“Generations ago, Maria Arena decided that cloning gave her the perfect opportunity to study everything she’d ever been interested in. “There’s not enough time” was no excuse to a clone. Time was all she had, and she used it as well as she could to study”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes

“It was with pure secular horror that Maria watched the Behemoth knit together the strands of protein to create a pig before her very eyes.”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes

“Principles are easy to have when you have a place to live and regular meals.”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes

“She spent a few passive years simply waiting for annoying people around her to die, like a horse who occasionally flicks its tail at a fly. To experience the other side of the coin, she also spent some years practicing aggressive revenge against those who wronged her, and found the passive life more enjoyable.”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes

“Extremist individuals live inside every single group on the planet. Devout followers from Christian to Muslim who kill in the name of God, down to people who perpetuate a cycle of abuse from parent to child. And do you know at what point they're labeled terrorists?"
Martini said. "When the government--"
"When the news reports it." . . .”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes

“One thing being cloned several times got you was patience. She spent a few passive years simply waiting for annoying people around her to die, like a horse who occasionally flicks its tail at a fly. To experience the other side of the coin, she also spent some years practicing aggressive revenge against those who wronged her, and found the passive life more enjoyable.”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes

“Everyone was horrified at the thought of someone seeing them on the can, and yet almost no one got any thrill looking at that.”
― Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes