Behemoth Quotes

“Failure to converge. Confidence limits exceeded.

Further predictions unreliable.”
― Peter Watts, Behemoth: β-Max

“Thank you, South Fucking Africa. What was it with those people? They’d been a typical Third World country in so many ways, enslaved and oppressed and brutalized like all the others. Why couldn’t they have just thrown off their shackles in the usual way, embraced violent rebellion with a side order of blood-soaked retribution? What kind of crazy-ass people, after feeling the boot on their necks for generations, struck back at their oppressors with—wait for it—reconciliation panels? It made no sense. Except, of course, for the fact that it worked. Ever since Saint Nelson the S’Africans had become masters at the sidestep, accommodating force rather than meeting it head-on, turning enemy momentum to their own advantage. Black belts in sociological judo. For half a century they’d been sneaking under the world’s guard, and hardly anyone had noticed.”
― Peter Watts, Behemoth: B-Max: Rifters Trilogy, Book 3 Part I

“But that’s not all of it. That’s just the rationale that floats on the surface, obvious and visible and self-serving. There’s another reason, deeper and more ominous:”
― Peter Watts, Behemoth: B-Max: Rifters Trilogy, Book 3 Part I

“doesn’t have much of what you’d call a conscience, and if that’s your definition of a psycho then I guess he is one. But he didn’t choose it.” “What difference does it make?” Alyx demands. “It’s not like he went out shopping for an evil makeover.” “So what? When did any psycho ever get to choose his own brain chemistry?” It’s a pretty good point,”
― Peter Watts, Behemoth: B-Max: Rifters Trilogy, Book 3 Part I

“He’s a sociopath. He wasn’t born to it. There are ways of telling: a tendency to self-contradiction and malapropism, short attention span. Gratuitous use of hand gestures during speech.”
― Peter Watts, Behemoth: B-Max: Rifters Trilogy, Book 3 Part I

“And yet, that didn’t mean it had lied, necessarily. Why bother, if the truth would do the job? And it all made so much sense. Not a sin, but a malfunction. A thermostat, set askew through no fault of his own. All life was machinery, mechanical contraptions built of proteins and nucleic acids and electricity; what machine ever got creative control over its own specs? It was a liberating epiphany, there at the dawn of the sovereign Quebec: Not Guilty, by reason of faulty wiring. Odd, though. You’d have expected it to bring the self-loathing down a notch or two in the years that followed.”
― Peter Watts, Behemoth: B-Max: Rifters Trilogy, Book 3 Part I

“Overhead, the skin of the ocean writhes like dim mercury. It tilts and dips and scrolls past in an endless succession of crests and troughs, twisting a cool orb glowing on the other side, tying it into playful dancing knots. A few moments later they break through the surface and look onto a world of sea and moonlit sky.”
― Peter Watts, Behemoth: B-Max: Rifters Trilogy, Book 3 Part I

“The world is not dying, it is being killed. And those that are killing it have names and addresses. —Utah Phillips”
― Peter Watts, Behemoth: B-Max: Rifters Trilogy, Book 3 Part I

“So many changes, he reflected. So many fold catastrophes in pursuit of new equilibria.”
― Peter Watts, Behemoth: B-Max: Rifters Trilogy, Book 3 Part I

“The water's too deep to stand in now— ...feebly treading water although her limbs must be frozen almost to paralysis. It's a pointless effort, a brainstem effort; last duties discharged, last options exhausted, still the body grabs for those last few seconds, brief suffering still somehow better than endless nonexistence.”
― Peter Watts, Behemoth: β-Max

“If there’s one thing I’m the world’s greatest expert on, it’s how it feels to be me. And”
― Peter Watts, Behemoth: B-Max: Rifters Trilogy, Book 3 Part I

“Comforting lies get far too easy with practice.”
― Peter Watts, Behemoth: B-Max: Rifters Trilogy, Book 3 Part I