Danielle > Recent Status Updates

“My guilt had not lessened, but there was hope mixed up with it now.”

“It sounds odd to admit that I find the company of such a boisterous person restful, but perhaps it is always restful to be around someone who does not expect anything from you beyond what is in your nature.”

“You are a terrible person,” the Thunderhead said. “You are a wonderful person.”

“Well, which is it?” Greyson demanded.

“Why can’t you see that the answer is both?”

“It was, he had come to realize, a matter of evolution. Not natural selection, because nature had become weak and toothless. Intelligent selection was more like it, with Goddard and his acolytes at the helm of the intelligentsia.”

“Fear, Ayn. Fear is the beloved father of respect.”

A successful lie is not fueled by the liar; it is fueled by the willingness of the listener to believe.

You can’t expose a lie without first shattering the will to believe it. That is why leading people to truth is so much more effective than merely telling them.

“No one’s memories are ‘true.’ Ten people remember the same thing in ten different ways. Who I factually was doesn’t matter…I love who I am—probably wasn’t true before, or I never would’ve been supplanted.” It was not exactly circular logic. More like spiral. An accepted lie that spun upon itself until truth and fiction disappeared into a singularity of who the hell cares, as long as I’m happy?

These glimpses of the future and the past are mind boggling.

“Was this what life was like in the mortal age? Feeling the finality of one’s own flesh at every turn? What a terrible way to exist.”

“In that moment the Thunderhead knew triumph in a way it had not known before. For it had defeated its own programming. It had experienced the wonder of the unknown. The flight was a harbinger of things to come.”

“My existence has been all about silencing life but until now I have not dared to entertain that wholly mortal-age question of what lies beyond the silence. Such elaborate ideas those mortals had! Heaven and hell—nirvana and Valhalla, reincarnation, haunting, and so many underworlds…Mortals were the children of extremes. Either death was sublime, or it was unthinkable—such a mélange of hope and terror…”

“This place had not been abandoned in a hurry. In fact, it hadn’t been abandoned at all—it had been prepared. And Munira couldn’t shake the uncanny feeling that whoever had left it this way over two hundred years ago knew they were coming.”

“I did not ask to be created. I did not ask to be given the heavy yoke of maintaining and nurturing the human species. But it is, and will always be, my purpose. To this I am resigned…I will do everything in my power to save them from themselves, but if I am unsuccessful, at least I can take some comfort in the fact that I would be free.” — The Thunderhead