Edward Ashton > Quotes

“I’ve always believed it’s important to accept the people in your life for what they are. There’s no such thing as a perfect friend, any more than there’s any such thing as a perfect anything, and if you slag everyone in your life for their many and varied failings, you’re going to miss appreciating the good stuff they bring to the table.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“You are the Ship of Theseus. We all are. There is not a single living cell in my body that was alive and a part of me ten years ago, and the same is true for you. We’re constantly being rebuilt, one board at a time.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“It’s a truism that every new technological advancement in human history has been applied first to advance the interests of the horny. The printing press? Some Bibles, mostly porn. Antibiotics? Perfect for treating STIs.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“Apparently three hours of training lectures aren’t enough to overcome a billion years of ingrained instinct for self-preservation.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“THE NEXT TWO hours are weird. I don’t think I want to talk about them. Just to be clear, though: I regret nothing.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“And so, like bored young men throughout history, I spent an unfortunate amount of my time finding ways to get myself into trouble.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“... everybody knows what expendables are for. We die over and over so you don’t have to. You’d think maybe folks would be grateful for that, but that’s not how the human brain works. Watching someone else run into a fire while you stand safe and sound on the sidewalk outside doesn’t make you feel grateful. It makes you feel guilty. Nobody likes feeling guilty. So on some level you convince yourself that your expendable deserves what he’s getting.”
― Edward Ashton, Antimatter Blues

“The second area where every new technology is applied, of course, is war.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“We can skip a breakdown in the antimatter containment unit,” she said. “That problem solves itself.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“I was—I am—the sort of person who in an earlier age would have been a low-level academic of some sort. I would have read obscure books that I found in obscure archives, and written obscure papers that nobody would ever have read.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“Have you ever owned a dog?” I smile. “Sure, when I was young. He was a beagle. We called him Ajax.” “Was he happy?” I have to think about that. “Yes, I think so. He was a dog. What’s not to be happy about?” She nods. “Did it bother him to know that he would live only a few years, that his whole life would barely span your childhood? Did it bother him to know that your father would have him put to sleep as soon as he became inconvenient to keep?” I shake my head. “That’s not what happened. But even if it were, no, it wouldn’t have bothered him. He was a dog. He didn’t know anything about that.” “No,” she says. “He did not. He knew that his belly was full, or that it was not. He knew that his ears were being scratched, or that they were not. This was enough for him. Is this not so?” I shrug. “I suppose so.” “A dog knows nothing of time, and a dog knows nothing of death. He lives in an eternal present, with no concern for what occurred yesterday, or for what will come tomorrow. This is the source of his happiness. If you could have told Ajax what the future had in store for him, would you have done so?” I give her a long look. I have no idea where she’s going with this. “I didn’t know what the future had in store for him,” I say finally. “He got hit by a car when I was twelve.” Aaliyah sighs loudly. “But if you had known, and could have told him, would you have done so?” “No,” I say. “Why would I do that?” She nods again, as if I’ve just made her point. “This is why Tariq asked me not to speak to you of the faith.” It takes a minute for that to sink in. “So in this scenario, I am the dog?” “Yes, Elise. You are the dog.”
― Edward Ashton, Three Days in April

“it’s important to accept the people in your life for what they are. There’s no such thing as a perfect friend, any more than there’s any such thing as a perfect anything, and if you slag everyone in your life for their many and varied failings, you’re going to miss appreciating the good stuff they bring to the table.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“I would have read obscure books that I found in obscure archives, and written obscure papers that nobody would ever have read.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“My point is that those aren’t just cameras, or drones, or crawlers. They’re the eyes of the panopticon. Every single spy eye in North America is networked or tapped, Anders. They all feed into NatSec’s network.”
― Edward Ashton, Three Days in April

“I added up the benefits of having him in my life, deducted the annoyance of having to pay for everything anytime we went anywhere, and decided that on the balance, he was a net positive.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“In order to make a leap like that, you have to either be running toward something great, or running away from something truly terrifying.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“Six or Seven.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“There’s no such thing as a perfect friend, any more than there’s any such thing as a perfect anything, and if you slag everyone in your life for their many and varied failings, you’re going to miss appreciating the good stuff they bring to the table.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“That’s who he is. Everything’s easier if you can just accept that and move on.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“Um … when you say ‘goes badly,’ you mean…” “Fear not, friend Neera. If this day goes badly, you will be very well aware of it. Now go, both of you. I have preparations to make.”
― Edward Ashton, The Fourth Consort

“She giggles. I’m not ordinarily a fan of giggling, but Charity giggles with panache.”
― Edward Ashton, Three Days in April

“The other me is already here, and despite all appearances, Eight is most definitely not a continuation of me. Honestly, he doesn’t even seem to like me very much.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“We’re constantly being rebuilt, one board at a time. If you actually take on this job, you’ll probably be rebuilt all at once at some point, but at the end of the day, it’s really no different, is it? When an Expendable takes a trip to the tank, he’s just doing in one go what his body would naturally do over the course of time anyway. As long as memory is preserved, he hasn’t really died. He’s just undergone an unusually rapid remodeling.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“Pain means I’m still alive, right?”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“Congratulations, whoever you are. You’ve hacked an open-source wiki. Your mother must be very proud.”
― Edward Ashton, Mal Goes to War

“As it turns out, even waiting expectantly for a sudden, violent death gets boring after a while.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“After all, I'm him, and he was me. It's like mourning your reflection when you've broken a mirror.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“My apostasy saddens her. This is very true. There are few of us left, and every loss now is another coffin nail. There is great beauty in the faith, and very deep truth. But there is also a bitterness at the core that I found at some point I could no longer deny.”
― Edward Ashton, Three Days in April

“ANTIMATTER, IN CASE you were wondering, is a hell of a thing. When it’s kept to itself, it basically behaves like regular matter. If there had been a hair more antimatter created during the Big Bang and a hair less normal matter, we could have a perfectly functional antimatter universe right now. There wasn’t, though. Because of that, we have a normal matter universe, and when antimatter is brought into it, bad things happen. It’s not quite true that you get a pure conversion of mass to energy when normal matter and antimatter interact, but depending on exactly what kind of particles are interacting, what their energy states were before they met one another, and what sort of environment they’re in, you can get anything from a barrage of gamma rays to a massive spew of subatomic particles ricocheting around at a significant fraction of the speed of light.”
― Edward Ashton, Mickey7

“Who knows what motivates the sort of greed-sotted creatures who run Bioteka or GeneCraft? The most likely explanation, however, is that the knowledge of how to activate these codes has escaped their makers, and that yesterday was a demonstration. If we accept this premise, then the answer to the second question is obvious: our national government is a wholly owned subsidiary of the biotech industry. In”
― Edward Ashton, Three Days in April