Sam J. Miller Quotes

Soq was beyond gender. They put it on like most people put on clothes. Some days butch and some days queen, but always Soq, always the same and always uncircumscribable underneath it all.

I thought about puking up all those sandwiches once I saw what I had done, but that's a line I won't cross. If you make yourself puke, you have a problem.

Stories are where we find ourselves, where we find the others who are like us. Gather enough stories and soon you're not alone; you are an army.

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.

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

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.

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.

(...) And through it all I thought of my mother and the lives she didn't get to live.

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

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.

Depending on what the body you're born into looks like, you get put in a box marked either Boy or Girl. That box is packed with expectations and requirements, demands and obligations. The box says you can like This, but not That. The box says you can wear This, but not That. The box might fit you perfectly. In that case, everything will be wonderful. Alternately, the box might be so cramped and tight and full of horrible things that you'd rather be dead than spend another minute in it.

The greatest power comes from love, from knowing who you are and standing proudly in it.

I still wasn't entirely convinced that if somebody suddenly gave me the power to snap my fingers and cease to exist, I wouldn't use it.

I wasn't suicidal anymore. But once you go there, once your mind has seriously weighed it as a possibility, it never really goes away. It's always there - always an option.

Our people are in danger," she said. "Evil has come to Qaanaaq. I need strong men. Men who are not afraid."

Kaev wanted to laugh at the anachronistic use of the word men to mean people.

Straight men will insult and assault and beat and kill gay men because they are terrified. Because masculinity is the foundation they built their whole worldview on, the set of lies that lets them believe they are inherently better than women, and gay people expose how flimsy and arbitrary the whole thing is.

Don't the stars make you feel so small?" Bastien said, and there was a slight roughness around his words from where his lip was already swollen.
"People always say that," Ott said. "I don't understand it. The stars make me feel . . ." I could hear the gears turning, the struggle as Ott tried to cram the whole huge tapestry of his thoughts into the meager words of his vocabulary. "They make me feel big. A giant cosmic accident. Like - what are the chances that I would even happen? You know? If my parents hadn't met, if the dinosaurs never died out . . . we might not be here. But here we are. And we get to look up at the stars at night. Who would appreciate them if we didn't?

Congratulations! You have acquired one human body. This was a poor decision, but it is probably too late for you to do anything about it. Life, alas, has an extremely strict return policy.

Silence was my sister's weapon. When people hurt or angered her, she never got loud like Mom or mean and smart-ass like me. Silence was how she fought back. It wasn't passive, or an act of helplessness: it was a cold cruel withering blade, lasting far longer than my mother's rage or my own antagonism, strong enough to make us practically beg for forgiveness every time.

Except now her weapon had gone haywire, turned on herself, driven her from her home and her support system and into what-knew-what kind of danger.

She thinks I'm a child who needs to be protected from the horrors of grown-ups, because she somehow forgets that the world of children has its own horrors. And that the world of teenagers holds the horrors of both.