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Walkaway

Book by Cory Doctorow · 13 quotes · Guilt, Love, Fear

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Walkaway Quotes

“There were no deaths. It was miraculous, but Limpopo had a theory: "I think the bombers lost their nerve. The stables went up during their maintenance cycle, when there'd be no one there. The power plant went up ten minutes later, plenty of time for everyone to be on the lawn, staring at the stables, far from the blast. The inn's explosives, going off hours later? Either we're dealing with a terrorist who sucks at timers, or they wanted to be sure of minimal casualties. It's what you'd do if you wanted to convince your bosses you'd been a good little mad bomber, but didn't want too much blood on your hands.”

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“She had parents. People who loved her. Every human was a hyper-dense node of intense emotional and material investment. Speaking meant someone had spent thousands of hours cooing to you. Those lean muscles, the ringing tone of command - their inputs were from all over the world, carefully administered. The mere was more than a person; like a spaceship launch, her existence implied thousands of skilled people, generations of experts, wars, treaties, scholarship, and supply-chain management. Every one of them was all that.”

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“This is beautiful, good and virtuous. It is most prolific and healthy without us. So the best human course is to absent ourselves from it, to do what the original Thetfordians did, but on a grand scale. Evacuate the planet." "Uh." "Think of it for a minute. I'm not talking mass suicide. I'm talking about balancing our material needs with our aesthetic or, if you want to call it that, our spiritual needs. We'd be seriously bummed if all the wilderness disappeared. We care about Earth and the things that live here because we co-evolved with them, so our brains are the products of millions of years' worth of selection for being awed and satisfied by this kind of place. At the same time, we're consultive top predators with the propensity to engage in self-evolution. We've hacked Lysenkoism into Darwin.”

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“If your ship goes down in the middle of the open water, you don't give up and sink. You tread water, clutch onto a spar, do 'something'." He stopped, wrung his hands. "Realistically speaking, if you're in the middle of the sea, you're a goner. But you tread water until you can't kick another stroke. Not because you're optimistic. I you polled ten random shipwreck victims treading open water in open sea, every one would tell you they're not optimistic. What they are is 'hopeful'. Or at least not hope-'empty'. They don't give up because that means death and living people can sometimes change their situations, while dead ones can't change a fucking thing. I've never been lost at sea, but I think if your buddy was weaker than you, and you were holding him up, you'd kick just as hard, because you'd be hoping for both of you. Because giving up for someone else is even harder than giving up for you." "Now I'm walkaway, I've been shot at and chased from my home, but I can't feature going back to default, because default is the bottom of the sea and walkaway is a floating stick we can clutch. Default has no use for us except as a competition for other non-zottas, someone who'll do someone else's job if they get too uppity and demand to be treated as human beings instead of marginal costs. We are surplus to default's requirements. If they could, they'd sink us. So what we're doing, Gretyl, is exercising hope. It's all you can do when the situation calls for pessimism. Most people who hope have their hopes dashed. That's realism, but everyone whose hopes 'weren't' dashed 'started off by having hope'. Hope's the price of admission. It's still a lotto with shitty odds, but at least it's our lotto. Treading water in default thinking you might become a zotta is playing a lotto you can't win, and whose winners - the zottas - get to keep winning at your expense because you keep playing. Hope's what we're doing. Performing hope, treading water in open ocean with no rescue in sight.”

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“Natalie, as hard as you might find this to believe, I respect you in addition to loving you as your father. I would like the part of you that makes you "you" to survive this adventure. I don't want an automaton with a superficial resemblance to my daughter. I want you to realize all this pissing around with radical politics and campouts with dropouts is not a long-term strategy. I understand you feel guilty about having so much when everyone else has so little, but what good do you think it does to turn your back on reality? You can't wish inequality away.”

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