Austin Grossman > Quotes

“There's a fine line between a superpower and a chronic medical condition.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“When your laboratory explodes, lacing your body with a supercharged elixir, what do you do? You don't just lie there. You crawl out of the rubble, hideously scarred, and swear vengeance on the world. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“When you can't bear something but it goes on anyway, the person who survives isn't you anymore; you've changed and become someone else, a new person, the one who did bear it after all.”
― Austin Grossman

“One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered... I'm going to put a mask on and scrawl my name across the face of the world, build cities of gold, come back and stomp this place flat, until even the bricks are just dust. So you can just shut up. All of you. I'm going to move the world.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“Even if I turned myself in, it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't make me one of them. I knew that when I got my powers, but really I knew it before then. I learned it as a child on my first day of school, on the warm rainy streets of Bangkok, and in college. If you're different you always know it, and you can't fix it even if you want to. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“I'm the smartest man in the world. Once I wore a cape in public, and fought battles against men who could fly, who had metal skin, who could kill you with their eyes. I fought CoreFire to a standstill, and the Super Squadron, and the Champions. Now I have to shuffle through a cafeteria line with men who tried to pass bad checks. Now I have to wonder if there will be chocolate milk in the dispenser. And whether the smartest man in the world has done the smartest thing he could do with his life.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“Your powers are what you always have with you. It’s one piece of knowledge we all share here. No matter how many dossiers the government keeps on you, no matter what data your enemies have collected, no one knows your powers the way you do. Everyone has seen them on TV. For everyone else, it’s a momentary fantasy. They don’t have to take them into the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom. Or wake up in the night in flames, or sweep up shattered glass in their apartment, or show up late for work with a black eye. No one else knows where they itch or bruise you, or has tried the things you’ve tried with them when you were bored or desperate. No one else falls asleep with them and finds them still there in the morning, a dream that won’t disperse upon waking.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“If you're different you always know it, and you can't fix it even if you want to”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given, and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“This morning on planet Earth, there are 1,686 enhanced, gifted, or otherwise superpowered persons. 678 use their powers to fight crime, while 441 use their powers to commit them. 44 are currently confined in Special Containment Facilities for enhanced criminals. Of these last, it is interesting to note that an unusually high proportion have IQs of 300 or more -- eighteen to be exact. Including me. You really have to wonder why we all end up in jail.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“If you haven't been this close to superhumans, you don't understand what it's like to fight them. Even when you've got powers yourself, the predominent impression is one of shock. The forces moving around you are out of human scale, and your nervous system doesn't know how to deal with it. It's like being in a car accident, over and over again. You never feel the pain until later.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“I often wonder what Einstein would have done in my position. At Peterson, I kept an Einstein poster in my room, the one that says 'Imagination is more important than knowledge.' Einstein was smart, maybe even as smart as Laserator, but he played it way too safe. Then again, nobody ever threw a grappling hook at Einstein. I like to think he would have enjoyed my work, if he could have seen it. But no one sees anything I do, not until it's hovering over Chicago.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“There are days when you just don't feel all that evil."

You don't become a world-class villain overnight."
-Dr. Impossible”
― Austin Grossman

“Computers had their origin in military cryptography—in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression.”
― Austin Grossman, You

“You don't build a 100 ft robot out of nothing.....there's rumors and gossip, trace evidence. There's a shadow economy out there, where these things get done.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“I'm cold and free and the smartest man in the world, and this time they're going to know it, I promise you. I promise you that.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“Some days I spent up to three hours in the arcade after school, dimly aware that we were the first people, ever, to be doing these things. We were feeling something they never had - a physical link into the world of the fictional - through the skeletal muscles of the arm to the joystick to the tiny person on the screen, a person in an imagined world. It was crude but real. We'd fashioned an outpost in the hostile, inaccessible world of the imagination, like dangling a bathysphere into the crushing dark of the deep ocean, a realm hitherto inaccessible to humankind. This is what games had become. Computers had their origin in military cryptography - in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression. We'd done that, taken that idea and turned it into a thing its creators never imagined, our own incandescent mythology.”
― Austin Grossman, You

“Save the world? I don't think so. I have my reasons. The world was lost a long time ago, and nothing's going to fix it, maybe not even science.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“Little Red Riding Hood was a good story, but it wasn't interactive. Sooner or later I wanted to say 'no, I may be Red Riding Hood but I don't care about my grandmother; what I want is heroin and only heroin,' whereas the game had only 'over the river and through the woods' to offer me. Which was a good story, it just might not me mine.”
― Austin Grossman, You

“The woman was simply leaving us alone with our future, the future she wouldn't be a part of. She didn't know how to do it or what it was, but she was trying to give it to us.”
― Austin Grossman, You

“None of the questions was what I expected. Most of them were esoteric thought experiments, 'How would you turn Pride and Prejudice into a video game?' and 'If you added a button to Pac-Man, what would you want it to do?' Conundrums like 'How come when Mario jumps he can change direction in midair?”
― Austin Grossman, You

“He had never been to a party like this and it struck him as a little bizarre, like a feverish nightmare version of school. It was the exact same mass of people, but they had all shown up in the middle of the night, and now there were no teachers and everyone stood in the hallways talking as loudly as possible, and there were no classes except lunch, or else the classes were all different and he hadn't ever studied for any of them.”
― Austin Grossman, You

“It was an unfamiliar feeling, waking up with a place to go, a place I was actually beginning to comprehend and face without a sense of terror.

More than that, I was even questioning the assumption that I was, in my bones, a scared and anxious and miserable person. It felt like the days were almost supernaturally good, that I could wake up without the usual wave of terror, that the days were admixed with some foreign substance dripping into them, some animating essence, like the dragonborn races of Endoria, dragonborn days. I felt like I'd stumbled on one of the open secrets of the world. Why hadn't I realized before that being a grown-up could be anything you wanted it to be?”
― Austin Grossman, You

“Could you make a computer imagine an entire world? How would you start? A generation of people would wrestle with this problem—they're still wrestling with it.”
― Austin Grossman, You

“We were feeling something they never had—a physical link into the world of the fictional—through the skeletal muscles of the arm to the joystick to the tiny person on the screen, a person in an imagined world. It was crude but real.”
― Austin Grossman, You

“It doesn't matter. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“I was thirty-five and I’d thought I was playing political poker and it turned out I’d been playing in some other game I didn’t even know about. Like I’d been holding a hand of kings and then the people around the table started putting down more kings, a king with a squid’s face, a naked king with goat’s horns holding up a bough of holly. A Russian king with an insect’s voice.”
― Austin Grossman, Crooked

“I miss the girl I was, and I wish I could tell her that. But she got hurt really bad and I've been waiting such a long time for her to be okay again. I bet she never dreamed she would live so long, or do the things she can do now. I wish I could tell her what she'd grow up to be, how strange and beautiful and unexpected she'd be. She'd probably feel a lot better if she knew. The sky and the stars are brilliant, and I think of how much she would have loved this.”
― Austin Grossman, Soon I Will Be Invincible

“You haven't known terror until you've been chased by a man-sized crow.”
― Austin Grossman, Crooked

“... as Eskimo language is to snow, so archaic English is to 'metal objects designed to cause harm'.”
― Austin Grossman, You