Best 15 quotes of Sam J. Miller on MyQuotes

America has fallen and I don't feel so good myself.

Bodybreaking, they called it. What happened when the breaks finally killed you. The moment your mind's hold on the here and now finally ruptured forever and you broke free from your body.

Do not talk about the past here. Do not ask your neighbor why they left wherever they are from; do not expect your newfound friends to wax nostalgic for homes that no longer exist. Perhaps the past holds more than merely pain for you, but you can't assume that this is true for anyone else. We want to smell it, taste it, hear its songs, feel its desert heat or summer rain, but we do not want to talk about it. The things we've been through cannot hurt us here, unless we let them. The Fallen cities, the nations drowned in blood. The cries of our loves ones. Those stories we lock away. We will need new ones.

Every city is a war. A thousand fights being fought between a hundred groups. Rich, poor, old, young, born-here, and not-born-here. The followers of this god and the followers of that one. Someone will have the upper hand in each of these battles. Those people will make the rules, whether they're administered by priests or soldiers or politicians or programs. Fixing this is hard. Put new people in power, write new laws, erase old ones, build cities out of nothingness - but the wars remain, the underlying conflicts are unaffected. Only power shifts the scales, and people build power only when they come together. When they find in each other the strength to stop being afraid

Everyone can afford to be nice to each other, when no one is trying to exterminate anybody.

Every superhero, every Chosen One, goes through a painful and difficult process of Becoming. On this, all the relevant literature is in agreement. Ask any comic book aficionado, any movie buff. The heroes doubt themselves, even when confronted with irrefutable evidence. They've spent their whole lives listening to weak and powerless people who hate and fear anything that is different, who say that superhuman abilities simply don't exist, and they believe it.

Money is a mind, the oldest artificial intelligence. Its prime directives are simple, its programming endlessly creative. Humans obey it unthinkingly, with cheerful alacrity. Like a virus, it doesn't care if it kills its host.

Multicolored pipes vein the outside of every building in a dense varicose web: crimson chrome for heat, dark olive for potable water, mirror black for sewage. And then the bootleg ones, the off-color reds for hijacked heat, the green plastics for stolen water.

Qaanaaq was governed by a hundred thousand computer programs... but sometimes contradictory or irreconcilable mandates sparked a squabble that brought an agency's operations to a standstill until a human--or more likely--another AI intervened.

Slums are always a marvel; how human desperation can seem to warp the very laws of physics.

...the most myth-shrouded story of all is that of the nanobonded. A whole community of people who were either deliberately or accidentally exposed to the experimental wireless nanomachines that established one-to-one networks between individuals, and who, through years of training and imprinting, could "network" themselves to animals, forming primal emotional connections so that they could control their animals through thought alone.

They add up, the tiny harmless things we harbor, the little guilts and baby sins, the crimes we think we only commit against ourselves. The indignities we suffer. The stories we tell ourselves about how wicked we are. Or how helpless. They can crush cities, raise seas.

We want villains. We look for them everywhere. People to pin our misfortunate on. Whose sins and flaws are responsible for all the suffering we see. We want a world where the real monstrosity lies in wicked individuals. Instead of being a fundamental facet of human society, of the human heart. Stories prime us to search for villains. Because villains can be punished. Villains can be stopped. But villains are oversimplifications.

Wood smells like wealth

You are bound to your body. Your body is shaped by its DNA, your parents' decisions, historic hate and hunger, contested elections, the rise and fall of the stars in the sky. Maybe your body is an awful place. Maybe, like me, you are there through no fault of your own. One day, you will break free of your body. Every one of us will. Until that Great Liberation comes, we must be content with the little liberations. The Shivers up the spine--the telltale tingle of a beautiful song. Geat sex; a good story.