Phillip Van Dyke

“Getting what you want,” Captain James Montrose Fitzwilliam’s mother had once told him, “comes with a price.  You get what you want.”
― Christopher Nuttall, The Nelson Touch

“Philosophy doesn’t travel at the same speed technology does. It takes a man forty years to realize what it took his father forty years to realize. And what’s worse, he resists the truths his father’s come to know, until he learns them himself. Meanwhile, technology doesn’t wait. All a man has to do is add another piece to his father’s technological puzzle and the machines, the weapons, the means, are stronger. In the end you have an army with the same philosophy of the cavemen, but with the weapons of ten billion artless minds. Do”
― Josh Malerman, Black Mad Wheel

“Life is, in essence, a simple matter. Its only goal is the maximising of pleasure. Even our much-lauded curiosity, our inclination to explore the universe and human nature, is a mere manifestation of the desire to accentuate and protract this pleasure. So when our sums end up on the minus side, when life offers us more pain than pleasure, and there’s no longer any hope of things changing, we end it. We eat or drink ourselves to death, swim out to where the current is strong, smoke in bed, drive when drunk, put off seeing the doctor even though the lump on the throat is growing. Or quite simply hang ourselves in the barn. It’s banal when you realise for the first time that this is actually a completely practical alternative; indeed, it doesn’t even feel like the most important decision of your life. To build that house or get that education – these are bigger decisions than choosing to end your life sooner than it otherwise would have ended.”
― Jo Nesbø, The Kingdom

“The child that was human civilization had opened the door to her home and glanced outside. The endless night terrified her so much that she shuddered against the expansive and profound darkness, and shut the door firmly.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End