Kevin Storr, APR, MSIDD @kevinstorr

“This is what I mean by wanting more. There is such a thing as negative peace, I think: a settled state in which so little has been gained and too much has been lost. I’m striving to restore the sense of wholeness that I used to take for granted as a boy.”

“‘Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.’”

“‘There is only one reason for doing something. And that's because you want to.’ Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of.”

“Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?” Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?”

“That’s how he was as a kid, and most people don’t change. He overthinks, overanalyzes, and then keeps it all to himself, amassing clever little secrets. It’s probably why he’s done so well with his life.”

“History isn’t what happened but what gets written down, and the various sources that make up the archival record generally overlooked the lives of poor black southerners.”

“Anyway, maybe there weren’t any solutions. Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.”

“I plead guilty to the charge of being too tight-lipped, though I might say my silence was judicious rather than dishonest; I cannot serve each master and each friend with equal shares. I do not even know myself who it is I want to please….”

“‘But-! I say! The common conventions of humanity-' 'Are all very well for common people.’”

“What is it you say now, what peace is there to be made in the last minutes of the last day that will mark the before and after of your life until then, the day that will change everything for both of you, the living and the dead?”

“‘And there’s something else I want you always to remember. There are magnificent beings on this earth, son, that are walking around posing as humans. And I don’t ever want you to forget that. You hear me?’”

“‘Such people forget that life and death are the affair of the good God.’ He spoke gravely. Mrs. Allerton said quietly, ‘I am glad to hear you say that. All the same, God chooses his instruments.’”

“‘Where we come from, our people have a saying. “No friend but mountains.” It means our fate is one of betrayal and abandonment. That we only have each other. No one else cares. We can only count on ourselves.’”

“‘But I sit here, and I don’t feel anything but fear. I don’t hear anything but silence.’ ‘The bad are the few, but often they shout louder than the many. Don’t mistake silence for weakness.’”

“…even I knew then that McTavish was the sourest-tasting word in publishing - popular. It’s the paradox of authorhood: apparently if you’re good enough to be popular, you’re too popular to be any good.”

“‘We all have difficult choices in life,’ he said. ‘It’s about finding what makes you truly happy and what propels you. What pushes you to fulfillment.’”

“‘Always remember, mine Sadie: life is very long, unless it is not.’ Sadie knew this to be a tautology, but it also happened to be true.”

“‘I’m autistic, not stupid,’ the boy says bluntly.”

“Later, after his mother was in the ground, he realized the Word was just as corrupt as the men who read it. Old Testament, New Testament, it was just words with a little w, written by zealots as PR for their new cult founded in the memory of a dead carpenter.”

“Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test.”