Willful Child Quotes

“The doc began waving a medical Pentracorder over Hadrian. “Oh dear! Fractured ego, sprained confidence, dislocated immodesty, and broken bravado! Can this even be cured? Extensive long-term damage is the sad prognosis, alas.”
― Steven Erikson, Willful Child: The Search for Spark

“At Prim’s side was a woman with a politician’s face (supercilious, sanctimonious, vacuous, terrified, smarmy, disingenuous, small-minded, vengeful, coldhearted, opportunistic, petty, deceitful, evidence-ignoring, bullying, arrogant, smug, obnoxious, contemptuous, ignorant, reactionary, condescending, patronizing, blinkered, vacillating, corrupt, morally bankrupt, blackmailing, blackmailable, dodgy, wavering, backstabbing, bought, sold, stinking rich, unqualified, sleazy, teeth-capped, kneecapping, corporate-owned, hate-mongering, fear-mongering, button-pushing, deflecting, evading, brazening, hit-song-stealing, nostalgia-worshipping, distorting, no-tax-returning, tax-evading, offshore-holding, shady-business-partnering, election-stealing, arms-dealing, collateral-damage signing-offing, hypocritically family-value bleating but sexually deviant-ing, honest-forthright-honorable—a paragon-of-integrity [lying], spiteful, unreliable, Teflon-coated, Saran-wrapped, white-breaded, xenophobic, cynical, uncomprehending of irony-ing, witless, thin-skinned, insecure, unfulfilled, blindly ambitious, power-hungry, sadistic, self-righteous, incapable of contemplation-ing, prevaricating, privileged, pampered, Ivy League–educated [in something useless like political science, economics, or law], pompous, ego-centered, centered, narcissistic, shallow, bullshitting, manipulative, backtracking, quote-denying, what-climate-changing?, alternate-truth-ing, prejudice-feeding, hate-inciting, racketeering, blame-shifting, warmongering, autocratic, megalomaniacal, possibly sociopathic, blathering, self-serving, unreliable, cliquey, cagey, crafty, cunning, daft, dull, ethically destitute, irredeemable, oil-burning, fracking [but NIMBY], self-pay-raising, self-congratulating, self-aggrandizing, but all that was just first impressions so who can say?).”
― Steven Erikson, Willful Child: The Search for Spark

“Madam, let's not be so crass. We're Terrans, after all, forever virtuous, eternally right in all matters of comportment, wise and clever, honest and forthright, inclined to modest errors in judgement while maintaining our heartfelt desire to do good and therefore entirely capable of sweeping under the carpet all the genocidal horrors studding our history in the galaxy.”
― Steven Erikson, Willful Child: The Search for Spark

“But it all turned out for the best, sir, didn't it?'
'Yup. But let's not let success undermine the patronizing certainty of our convictions.”
― Steven Erikson, Willful Child: The Search for Spark

“Look, universal consciousness only works when everybody’s on the same page. But no one’s ever on the same page. So instead you’ve got all these fragmented slices of consciousness, each one stuffed into this tiny brain, none of them capable of even recognizing any other consciousness as being just as legitimate as their own, and so the whole thing turns into this giant ego-wank.”
― Steven Erikson, Willful Child: The Search for Spark

“Hmm,” said Tammy, “and once more your naive optimism regarding the human species reveals its hopeless disconnect with reality. While it was well-established that prior to the Great EM Pulse following the Benefactors’ arrival in Earth orbit, virtually every human being on the planet had already become a drooling automaton with bloodshot eyes glued to a pixelated screen, even as the world melted around them in a toxic stew of air pollution, water pollution, vehicles pouring out carcinogenic waste gases, and leaking gas pipelines springing up everywhere along with earthquake-inducing fracking and oil spills in the oceans and landslides due to deforestation and heat waves due to global warming and ice caps melting and islands and coastlines drowning and forests dying and idiots building giant walls and—”
“All right, whatever!” Hadrian snapped. “But don’t you see? This is the future!” “Yeah, that statement makes sense.” “The future from then, I mean. Now is their future, even if it’s our now, or will be, I mean—oh fuck it. The point is, Tammy, we’re supposed to have matured as a species, as a civilization. We’re supposed to have united globally in a warm gush of integrity, ethical comportment, and peace and love as our next stage of universal consciousness bursts forth like a blinding light to engulf us all in a golden age of enlightenment and postscarcity well-being.”
“Hahahaha,” Tammy laughed and then coughed and choked. “Stop! You’re killing me!”
Beta spoke. “I am attempting to compute said golden age, Captain. Alas, my Eternally Needful Consumer Index is redlining and descending into a cursive loop of existential panic. All efforts to reset parameters yield the Bluescreen of Incomprehension. Life without mindless purchase? Without pointless want? Without ephemeral endorphin spurts? Without gaming-induced frontal lobe permanent degradation resulting in short-tempered antisocial short-attention-span psychological generational profiles? Impossible.”
“The EMP should have given us the breathing space to pause and reevaluate our value system,” said Hadrian. “Instead, it was universal panic. Riots in Discount Super Stores, millions trampled—they barely noticed the lights going out, for crying out loud.”
― Steven Erikson, Willful Child: The Search for Spark

“See this weapon in my hands? One false move and you’re nothing but atoms!'
Spark tilted its head. 'Confusion! Spark already is nothing but atoms! So is Klang Intruder!”
― Steven Erikson, Willful Child: The Search for Spark

“Call it uncharacteristic honesty. Our lives are crap, despite all the fancy titles and whatnot. We're small-minded pedantic pencil-pushers infected with jaw-dropping self-entitlement issues bolstered on a vast history of dragging down our betters at every turn and then bemoaning it later as we long for a return to the golden age our historical counterparts spent all their time destroying. Oh, the humanity!”
― Steven Erikson, Willful Child: The Search for Spark

“Uhm, in our universe human civilization has descended into a pseudo-fascist hate-mongering anti-intellectual humorless inflexible lowest-common-denominator corporate fuck-everyone-over paradigm of systemic inequality and suffering and misery except for the chosen few.”
― Steven Erikson, Willful Child: The Search for Spark

“The glory of endemic existential angst invites in one the conviction that nothing good will come of anything, so there is no way you can actually disappoint me since I'm already disappointed down to the very core of my being.”
― Steven Erikson, Willful Child: The Search for Spark

“beside each plate, personal communication/entertainment handled devices designed to obliterate the mindfulness of physical experiential reality in favor of vacuous distraction in an electronic ghost realm of extreme self-centered obsessive-compulsive existential despair disguised as "being connected"
'Ooh,' murmured Buck DeFrank, drawn closer to the table in the manner of a moth to the flame, 'has someone messaged me? I must know. Immediately! Wait!' he then cried, as Galk pulled the man back and held him in an armlock. 'Let go of me! I can't - I can't think! Aagh! What am I missing? What am I missing?”
― Steven Erikson, Willful Child: The Search for Spark