The Deluge Quotes

“Yeah, well, time marches on. Getting caught up in causes don’t interest me. Not anymore. Especially when you see the scope of what this is.” He took the Heinz ketchup bottle from the condiment holder. “That’s the thing: Most people don’t understand this. The ingredients, what it goes on, where the energy comes from to create it, the ways the world’s gotta be directed and coaxed and violated and controlled to get this one little fucked bottle. And once you see how ketchup relates to imperial maintenance it’s tough to not get an overwhelmed quality to your thinking. Like one of them Magic Eye thingamajobs—hard the first time, but once you get it, you’ll never unsee it.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“I plan on never being surprised by what this country’s capable of ever again.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“Violence against nature always goes hand in hand with violence against people.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“One came to understand that we all purchased, voted, worshiped, and loved in unconscious obedience to narratives we thought were original, but which were largely dreamed up in sterile boardrooms like the one in New York. Then we went and called these stories our passions and dreams.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“When you’re born into this world, you’re given a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“He fell into sleep so cavernous it felt less like rest than an excision of memory.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“Embarrassed, I shook my head. “No one deserves anything or anyone. That’s not how it works.” “I’m only saying—maybe you don’t want to hear this, but—Kate is a manipulator. She’s a user. I’ve known women like her my whole life. She takes endlessly from you. Charms you when she needs to, and then goes back to using you.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“What angered me was how few women spoke up in her defense. There was something bawdy about Kate that the feminist commentariat did not like. She was rough around the edges; she used “the language of toxic masculinity”; she worked with pro-life organizations and politicians; she rejected sloganeering and hashtags of various leftist movements in favor of more complex and nuanced examinations of power. She didn’t perform the stations of the cross prescribed by the woke hive mind, and this made her enemies.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“Peter employs a self-effacing jocularity. He is an individual who should be entrenched in his entitlement, and yet my experience of these three years has been quite the opposite. Peter is without artifice. Even when he uses the word bro, which he does with hyper-frequency, each bro has built within it a statement about the preposterousness of his own subculture. It took me perhaps too long to understand that Peter’s insistence that I make the short T ride from my apartment in Cambridge to his Back Bay condo went beyond my work on the black box. It dawned on me that his perpetual motion machine of conversation was not transactional. He simply enjoyed my company. Outside of the members of my family—who I often thought were pretending anyway—I’d never met anyone who did.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“another lunatic Twitter-troll game-show host!”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“We protest, invest, divest, blockade, persuade, disobey, make nonviolent trouble, and most importantly, we vote, every race, no matter what. And if there’s no one worth voting for, bitch, get yourself a clipboard, get your signatures, and get yourself on that motherfucking ballot.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“They’ are the Carbon Majors, the one hundred companies responsible for over seventy percent of emissions since the eighties. Their own scientists knew what would happen.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“pick up a copy of One Last Chance: How to Save Civilization by Moving to Total War on Climate Change by Dr. Anthony Pietrus.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“the conundrum of contemporary straight women”: We understand better than ever that men are selfish, arrogant, awful, and entitled, and yet we nevertheless spend most of our energy and intellect trying to find one who seems okay enough and will love us. Leftover emotional energy is then wasted on not wanting to want that. “I think you know”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“Blood Meridian lay in my hand, a limp accessory. I had never read anything by McCarthy.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“What suspense! Didn’t need to pay for the whole seat ’cause all I needed was the edge.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“Here in a campus bubble it was easy to look around and believe the country was swept up in a wave of change and possibility, a narrative propagated and commodified by the social media companies inflicting a new colonialism on people’s minds.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“The
last of his useless generation would die watching this down payment on chaos unspool.
Holly, Catherine, and their peers would witness civilization entering its violent
disintegration with a breakdown of the social order, mass starvation, disease, and
armed conflict over water and arable land.”
― Stephen Markley , The Deluge

“Contemporary fiction is all status quo white male entitlement regurgitated over and over with almost no perception of what’s unspooling outside of its closed circuit. All this literature of late capitalist exhaustion and alienation ad nauseam—no thanks.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“Yet, another Big One lay in wait. Atmospheric rivers have lashed and drowned California for generations, rainstorms of immense power that can drop millions of gallons of water in the span of a day. Scientists called the worst-case scenario ARkSTORM, a nine-hundred-year flood event that could overwhelm the state’s aging flood control infrastructure. Climate change made this biblical event that much more likely.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“If you don’t go get him back in here right now, so help me God—I am a dyke with a dick and I will fuck you with it until your colon prolapses.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“It’s that old saw: You strike your match and it gets blown out, so you strike the next one and that gets blown out too. And again and again, you keep lighting matches, and they keep getting blown out. But you gotta keep lighting them, right? Because you just don’t know which one is going to ignite the blaze.” I”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“I would’ve thought I’d told you often enough, Matt, history’s just a cheap story written by the powerful. Who the fuck cares what history thinks?” “You don’t think about how people will remember you?” She looked genuinely baffled by the question. “Why would I? Nah, kid. We come, we drink our drink, we sing our song, and that’s more than good enough.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“As bureaucrats have rediscovered again and again from time immemorial, getting people to do what is in their best interest is often more difficult than unleashing their worst natures.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“You might not believe in what we’re doing, but this is the kind of action on which history pivots. This is a choice between revolution against the power structures or our extermination by those structures. People like you and your family? You’re what they harvest. Everything you do, everything you buy, everything you believe in—that’s just product and profit for them. You’re their cash crop.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“For all the work I’d put in to make my person and position secure, it turned out all that wealth was illusory, only as meaningful as the willingness of others to believe it had any value at all.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“We often forget that Christianity began as a revolutionary movement of the powerless facing down the cold fury of the Roman Empire. It was a movement of the poor and dispossessed finally rising up. Christians waged a spiritual war for centuries with God’s love as their only weapon. It was a faith built to defy an empire, and it was persecuted with barbarity. People were crucified and burned alive for holding fast to the love and mercy of Christ’s gospel. So is this not a miracle we’re seeing? People demanding their safety and dignity and value on a global scale? Is this not how God works? Forget about mysterious ways—His hand moves through us with galvanic purpose that only the truly blind cannot see.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“No, I get it. You have to convince yourself that doing well and doing good are the same thing. The whole world’s run by people who think even when the dark days come, they’ll just sub in money for justice and it’ll all be fine.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“The report was called Positioned for Disruption: Strategy for Energy, Commodities, and Security Investment. “That’s quite the apocalyptic title.” “Smart kids on that team, but they’re hyped on the grandeur of thinking they can puppeteer the world.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge

“We are currently experiencing hunger, heat, and refugee flows that are simply outside humanity’s experience—all in a globalized media environment where terror and panic boost advertising dollars and algorithms turn disinformation into currency.”
― Stephen Markley, The Deluge