Quotes from Michael Stephen Fuchs

The only shot he ever fired in anger… was at himself.

Fick's eyes refocused, blinking from the cold wind of the incoming storm on his leathery face, he realized he was half-listening to some radio traffic. Something about some junior enlisted personnel caught fucking in the woods. Jesus Christ in an Alligator Fuckhouse, he thought, coming back from his unaccustomed philosophical maundering. What kind of goat-fellating third-world communist cock-suck military are they running around here?

And it occurred to Elliott, young as he was, that this might actually be the core contradiction of being human: born with the souls of angels – but mortal angels, meat angels, born to die and rot away. And that was maybe even the fundamental problem every human had to solve: how to live in a world where we are born to die.

Abrams remembered the old advice to never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes. Then, if he doesn't like it, you're a mile away. And you have his goddamned shoes.

George Bernard Shaw once said, "Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

But when the American south started to go down, as the unsecured southern border with Mexico became a raging and unmanageable vector for the virus… and as the military bases became beleaguered outposts in a rising sea of the dead… and then when well-meaning combat medics poked a hole in the dike by bringing infected men inside…

Every day is another chance. As the man said, 'We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

because they reminded them of the unpleasant fact that they lived in a dangerous world with wolves in it. And that they could only go about their lives safely under the watchful eyes and guns of the sheepdogs.

Despair made you helpless. Despair got in the way of the mission. And it never helped. It was the sin that was not so much unforgivable as totally pointless.

And it was about the human spirit. It will see you through, Drake figured. But, sometimes, only if you're willing to ride it to the far limit.

What a magnificent race of creatures, he thought, that could build an airport on top of a sailing ship. But what a wretched one that mainly used it to bomb one another back into the Stone Age…

You know what they call a leader with no followers?" The others waited for him to answer his own question. "Just a guy out taking a walk.

It won't suck itself - Arisen Book 9 - Allie

Happy birthday – you're about to get shot in the face, bitchacho!" Someone

everything was obvious in retrospect. They even had a name for it: "hindsight bias." It referred to the difficulty of remembering how little you knew at the time, how uncertain things were, before they all played out. Even wildly contingent events looked inevitable in retrospect. But they weren't. And it's actually psychologically difficult to imagine not knowing back then what you know now.

It would not be better if things happened to men just as they wish.

Right now, soles flapping, he was angling at high speed toward the short northwest edge of Red Square, which wasn't actually square at all, but really a long rectangle – typically Orwellian of the Soviets, declaring that 2+2=5. Anyway, he needed to get onto Tverskaya Street, that grand boulevard, fifteen lanes wide, formerly the route of all those phallic parades, and which met the square up at its top end.

You've worked for the government too long to imagine they have the resources or competence to cover shit up. Never attribute to conspiracy that which can adequately be explained by clusterfuckery.

Despair was the unforgivable sin. And he simply couldn't go out that way – he couldn't give up. If he was out of faith, he'd just have to push through it, and carry on. He'd fake it, if he had to.

What if grasshoppers had machine guns? Birds would be fucked!

Moby-Dick: "Here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.

What kind of asshat!" Aliyev actually screamed aloud, "Makes a grenade crate! That's fucking! Flammable!

random outcomes of contingent fate in an arbitrary and uncaring universe.

Which was more fucked up than a one-legged nun doing power squats in a cucumber patch.