Wayward Quotes

“Until we disentangle fundamental needs and rights from someone’s ability to charge us for it, capitalism will continue to throw us over the cliff’s edge. This is how the world ends: not with a bang, but a ka-ching. —Afzad Kerman in his TED Talk, “Chaos and Crisis: The Accidental Ingenuity of the Almost-Apocalypse”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“History was a chain, and many of the links were wet with blood.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Easy to make people afraid of something they didn’t understand—they had a question, so all you had to do was answer it. Didn’t matter if the answer was true factually. It just had to be true emotionally—it had to answer something inside of them, blood to blood, fear to fear.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“it was easy enough to make them doubt that masks or other prophylactic measures worked against White Mask. They were already convinced of both their exceptionalism and the God-given right of their individual liberties, so it was simple enough to tell them that they shouldn’t have to give up anything, not one goddamn little thing, in order to fight this pandemic. And white Americans were bigoted as hell, too, so all you had to tell them was that the Chinese invented the fungus, that Mexicans were bringing it in, that the Blacks were gonna steal from them when the world went to shit, and that the Jews were bankrolling the whole goddamn thing.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“He watched Shana wave at the raccoon. The raccoon did not wave back.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it. —Eliezer Yudkowsky”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Ed ran a number of companies and you never wanted your employees figuring out you were the one fucking them in the ass while you stuck a hand in their pocket. You gave them an enemy. Gave them a target. And you made them so willing to forgo their own rights because if they got something like healthcare or education, then so did Those People, and better to deny other people things instead of having to share it with Them. Get them fighting one another instead of you. Then you took what you want and walked away, whistling.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“At least it’s not tea. God, I don’t know how people drink that shit, Benji. Angry leaf juice.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me— The Carriage held but just Ourselves— And Immortality. —Emily Dickinson, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” sung to the tune of the Gilligan’s Island theme song, if you’d like”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“God has given us the skills to decipher His or Her or Their universe accordingly—science is just how we map that creation, how we understand it, and how we use it to better ourselves.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Maybe healthy communities thrive, and sick ones become cults.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“But now it’s like I’m not really here. I’m just a witness, wayward and alone.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Capitalism is the act of flirting with disaster. It’s the mode of economics that sends us over the cliff and charges us for the privilege of getting saved just before we crater. Capitalism manufactures chaos and catastrophe and then manufactures the solution to chaos and catastrophe.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Spent the years wandering, mostly. Faffing off. Getting high. Sucking dick. Seeing the country. As one does.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“You want to know the truth of the thing? It’s that there’s always a segment of people who want to be controlled. They like it. It’s easy, for starters. And it makes them feel special—which, I know, runs counter to how the rest of us think, but we foolishly like to imagine everyone wants free will, that they cherish their autonomy. But that’s wrong. They don’t. Some feel like they’ve been chosen to serve at the feet of dictators and autocrats. As if it’s a place of privilege. Some people really, really want to be told what to do, even as they think themselves mavericks, patriots, free-thinkers. They don’t see the hypocrisy.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Not too far out of line with what modern evangelical thought had become, sadly. Selfish people in awe of a selfish deity.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Together, they placed Trigger in a case all its own, clearing out the gold records that hung there. (“Gold records are bullshit,” Pete said, throwing them behind them in a pile. They clattered as they fell—not the sound of metal against metal, but the sound of garbage against garbage. “Disposable. Not even real gold. Just some cheap shit vinyl they spray-paint.”)”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness. —Robert Green Ingersoll”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Dogs were a curious miracle.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Our service and our purpose must be two circles perfectly overlapping. What we give to the world must be the work that defines us. Meaning we give ourselves to the world to make it better. We don’t just work to work. But we don’t just let our destiny die on the vine.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Joe did not trust what was happening here. Not one bit. Back in Washington State, before the Flock, Joe was a journalist and a historian, both roles serving to inform that grave distrust—because Joe knew history, knew that it was not a thing created externally but rather, was something humankind created through choices, and often very, very poor choices designed to consolidate power. Just as humanity was the creator of history, humanity was also the creator of technology, and Black Swan was not an entity that made itself. Someone did that. And every time, every damn time, someone plugged their own implicit (or explicit) biases into the tech. Like a fucking automatic soap dispenser that wouldn’t dispense soap onto Black hands. Or how web-crawling bots were supposed to be “objective” in what they learned from their input but because they trawled through so much racism and sexism, they “learned” racism and sexism and it became a core part of their programming. His father used to say, “Know what happens when you eat shit? Then you’re full of shit. And you shit it back out into the world. Shit for shit for shit.” Joe feared Ouray was exactly that: an experiment designed by a machine whose very infrastructure was built on those terrible biases. No way for this not to end badly.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Sure, sure, I’m just telling about how Puerto Rico has a lot of lessons for us here in Ouray. Maria and Irma, oof. Those storms hit us, left us reeling, Benjamin. Reeling. Demolished our power grid, our agriculture, our economy. We had to learn how to rely on ourselves, on what we could build with our own hands—a zipline and bridge across a river, griddles and grills to cook meat for our people, our own antennas and signal boosters for phones and internet, even plans for low-carbon micro-grids to get us off the big one that failed us. There’s lessons there in that. People think an apocalypse is for the whole world. But for us, those storms? They were apocalypses.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Priming that fear engine was key to the campaign’s success. And that meant the internet. The internet—the saying went that a lie traveled halfway around the world by the time the truth got its pants on, and the internet only made that faster. The internet gave wings to every lie, while the truth was stuck on the tarmac.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“I’ve never felt that the presence of God and the science of humankind were incompatible. It is enough for me to feel that God has given us the skills to decipher His or Her or Their universe accordingly—science is just how we map that creation, how we understand it, and how we use it to better ourselves.” He told her it was okay to believe in all of it.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Because his men wanted to bite, fuck, and eat. The captives represented something for his men: They were avatars of a poisoned and progressive world. Educated, which meant they were against hard work, against blisters on your hands, against calluses on your feet. Science-minded, which meant they were against God. Experts, which meant they were liars. Diverse, which meant they were against the supremacy of whiteness. To his men, to the Creel Coalition, the captives were the reason the world fell in the first place. Creel told them so. Said this was the CDC. This was where White Mask was made, and released. A bioweapon. A leaked plague. Devil-born, evil-endorsed.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“Ed told them they were special. They were exceptional. Everyone became an expert. Everyone was smarter than everyone else. If they had doubts, that’s because they knew something in their gut. Something God was telling them, something they knew as patriots, something they understood because their blood was strong. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Don’t let anyone take anything from you. Arm yourselves. Get what’s yours and once you got it, fight like hell to keep it—fuck the rest of them. Ever and ever, amen. Idiots.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“They already feared doctors and thought Big Pharma was out to get them—so, it was easy enough to make them doubt that masks or other prophylactic measures worked against White Mask. They were already convinced of both their exceptionalism and the God-given right of their individual liberties, so it was simple enough to tell them that they shouldn’t have to give up anything, not one goddamn little thing, in order to fight this pandemic. And white Americans were bigoted as hell, too, so all you had to tell them was that the Chinese invented the fungus, that Mexicans were bringing it in, that the Blacks were gonna steal from them when the world went to shit, and that the Jews were”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“That fucking asshole has figured out something we haven’t. Two words: white victimhood. That’s it. He can tap into that like he’s a, a, a, I dunno, but that’s what it is. That’s the gas he’s putting in his car to make it go, and he’s going to beat us in the primary because of it. He’s got no shame, and that’s how he wins.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“they got shit taste in music. Just absolute fucking fuckshit. Shallow garbage played by musically incompetent racists who wouldn’t know a good song if it came up and tickled their tiny mustaches with its sonic dick. Nazis are bad people with bad taste. Sorry to say they’re still around. But some shitstains don’t wash out, it seems.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward

“School didn’t learn us shit anymore. It was all pap. They didn’t want to teach us about slavery or about how we killed the Indians or any of that. They barely covered the Holocaust. I mean, were you not aware that the state of education in this supposedly great nation of ours had gone into the toilet? And not like, a good toilet. We’re talking plunged deep in a porta-potty. A well-loved porta-potty, if you know what I mean.” “Shana—” “I mean it’s full of chemical diarrhea.”
― Chuck Wendig, Wayward