Martha Wells Quotes

Young humans can be impulsive. The trick is keeping them around long enough to become old humans. This is what my crew tells me and my own observations seem to confirm it.

For a being as sophisticated as you are, it is baffling how little understanding you have of the composition of your own mind.

The big danger to humans is not raiders, angry human-eating fauna, or rogue SecUnits; it’s other humans. They kill each other either accidentally or on purpose and you have to clear that up fast because it jeopardizes the bond and determines whether the company has to pay out damages on it or not.

SecUnits don’t care about the news…mostly because the news was boring and I didn’t care what humans were doing to each other as long as I didn’t have to a) stop it or b) clean up after it.

The station approach traffic was heavy, and we were showing a twenty-seven-minute docking delay. Twenty-seven minutes was more than enough time for me to do something stupid.

I had archives of everything that had happened since I hacked my governor module, but I hadn’t had as much relevant experience in that time. But what I did have were thousands of hours of category mystery media, so I had a lot of theoretical knowledge that was possibly anywhere from 60 to 70 percent inaccurate shit.

This was another reason I didn’t like human security consultants. Some of them enjoyed their job too much.

That sounded like a great plan, in that it didn’t involve me.

Because change is terrifying. Choices are terrifying. But having a thing in your head that kills you if you make a mistake is more terrifying.

Self-determination was a pain in the ass sometimes but it beat the alternative by a lot.

Humans are nervous of me because I’m a terrifying murderbot, and I’m nervous of them because they’re humans.

They’re academics, surveyors, researchers, not action-hero explorers from the serials I liked because they were unrealistic and not depressing and sordid like reality.

They were all annoying and deeply inadequate humans, but I didn’t want to kill them. Okay, maybe a little.

I would defer to your expertise in shooting and killing things. You should defer to mine in data analysis.

Data suggests family dramas bear a less than 10 percent resemblance to actual human families, which is unsurprising and also a relief, considering all the murders. In the dramas, not Mensah’s family.