Top 15 L.K. Samuels Quotes

Humanity is plagued with monsters. No matter where you run, they will always follow you. My demons are also relentless. A whole team of exorcists could never expel my tormentors.

Each of us must live within that reality. Forecasting is not an exact science—the future leaves no footprints. We cannot predict the future because we cannot precisely measure the present. Quantum mechanics proved that. We live in a probability-based world. We all know that the sun will rise in the morning. But even that’s just a high probability. Nothing is assured—nothing.

That’s the horrible paradox. In essence, we were burning down our own houses to keep warm. Most intentions are noble, but when people started cranking up the wattage to impose order, we also generated a lethal voltage of disorder. Everything began to backfire. Like every great civilization of the past, we atrophy and finally cannibalize. We triggered our innate self-destruction mechanism that bore Frankenstein monsters.

It was amazing how fast the shiny luster of fame could tarnish.

Whenever I came across bits and pieces of my alleged past, I wanted to puke. Apparently, I had once had an unknown life with a family. What is the point of being alive unless you can remember living it, I wondered?

Almost everyone in private confessed their desire for buckets of money, but they usually swore the opposite in public. They bad-mouthed the rich as low-life scumbags. I could never understand why people despised something they wanted to be.

Hah, try conducting yourself with coltish munchkins on the playground. Children were our argotic nemesis. They had no sense of propriety. Without any approval whatsoever, they would cobble together words of unknown meaning. They would make up idioms laced with sexual contexts, bathroom humor, and secret signals. Most were unintelligible, seductively cryptic. Every time we erased one slang anathema, the children would create two more. Sometimes I think they were poking fun at us.

I had always subscribed to the cockroach theory: if you find one, there are bound to be far more. That meant that Dylan’s mission stank with a hoard of dirty-crawling secrets.

The notion of miracles had a nice ring. But we were all alone… The natural laws of cruel reality were going to win out. Not only would the cavalry fail to save the day, but they also probably never got their marching orders. If goodness existed somewhere on the planet, it was probably on an extended sick leave.

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. Ellen had more than a relevant point. Why was I so defensive about our debased government? Why jump headlong into a meat grinder to defend those who would toss us on a flaming broiler without a second thought?

I no longer have a desire to defend the indefensible. I no longer trust the trustless. ‘As it looks now,’ she said, ‘it seems we have become accustomed to harming our people.’

In the absence of truth, there is no penalty for failure. We seem destined to live in a failure-prone society.

They should issue ration coupons for information since it was always in short supply. The enemy could be rattling the gates of California or poised to ring my doorbell, and I would never know until it was too late.

I pulled my jacket’s front pockets inside out and dangled them, utterly empty, in front of Ellen. ‘I’ve got so much of nothing that I don’t know where to keep it all.’

Our long-standing standards of capacity to deceive others were being subverted. The virtue of lying had lost its connection to advancing the common good. Noble deceptions were evolving into inferior falsehoods. That our virtuous lies were being distorted to conceal all manner of misdeeds tore at my newly discovered conscience. These lies served only a selected few. That seemed so wrong.