Ruins Quotes

“If my life had no meaning, there was no reason not to end it."
"So you ended it?"
"So I gave it meaning.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“Nobody as a destiny. I mean, nobody has some kind of inescapable path for their life. This mug was made from clay, and that clay could have been anything at all until somebody made it into a mug. People aren't mugs, we are clay. Living, breathing, thinking, feeling clay, and we can shape ourselves into anything we want, and we keep shaping ourselves all our lives, getting better and better at whatever we want to be, and when we want to be something else we just smooth out the clay and start over. Your lack of 'purpose' is the single best thing about you, because it means you can be whatever you want.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“Love is when you find something so great, so... necessary, that it becomes more important to you than your own goals, than your own life - not because your life has no meaning without it, but because it gives your life a meaning it never had before.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“Finally Marcus stepped forward. "If you insist on going through me to get him, it's your call. But I warn you, I will probably cry when you hurt me, and you'll fell bad about it later."
Vinci looked at him. "That's your defiant speech?"
"Get used to it," said Marcus. "There's a lot more useless heroics where that came from.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“She looked at Woolf. "There's some kind of ...thing."
"That sentence wasn't as helpful as you probably intended it to be," said Marcus.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“Life is a lone wolf, scratching out a living with teeth and claws and a heart of stone.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“If you want to survive in this world, you need to stop asking why people work together, and just start working together.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“Would they be cheered by their recovery, or marked for life by their trauma?”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“This is life...Not a peace treaty, not an idealistic dream, but a grim dance of death and survival. The strong live on while the weak--the ones too small or too foolish to fight back--die in agony and blood.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“Do you know what’s going to happen when the world ends? We call it the end of the world, but it’s only the end of us. The world will go on, the planet and the life that lives on it. Rivers will keep flowing, the sun and the moon will keep turning, vines will creep up across the cars and the concrete. There will come soft rain. The world will forget that we were ever here. Human thought—the glorious zenith of five billion years of evolution—will go out like a candle, gone forever. Not because it was time, not because the world moved past us, but because we, as a people, were fools. Too selfish to live in peace, and too proud to stop our wars long after they ceased to have any real meaning...The only thing left of any value on this entire planet is their lives, but that’s not worth anything while the other guy still has his, so they kill each other. They are in a desperate race toward the final death. The winner will be the last one standing, and his prize is the final and most terrible solitude this world has ever known.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“You don't apologize for this Samm, it's love, and love doesn't weigh it's options and pick the best one. Love just wants things and it doesn't know why, and it doesn't matter why, because love is the only explanation love needs.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“Embrace your complexity, stretch your creativity, and live up to your potential, you are what makes the world great.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“And we're more valuable to you alive," said Marcus.
Delarosa cocked her head to the side. "How?"
"Because, um..." Marcus grimaced. "I don't actually know, I just assumed because that's what people typically say at this point.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“Quiet down," said Falin. "Didn't you say something about an ambush and a murderer?"
"Crap, yes," said Marcus, and pulled Kira down behind the escalator. "Also: murderess. Don't be sexist, women can murder people too.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“So, your plan is to murder a superior enemy army," said Tovar, "and then outrun the wind. I'm glad it's so simple.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“You weren't designed to cure RM, but you did it anyway. You weren't designed to cross the toxic wasteland, but you did that too, and then you escaped from I don't know how many bad guys, and crossed through the middle of a war zone, and while every other group of weary, bloodied refugees is getting smaller and smaller, yours is getting bigger. You're teaching people, and you're recruiting people, and it's not because you were built that way, or because you had some kind of glorious destiny to fulfill, but because you're you. You're Kira Walker. You're not going to save the world because you're the chosen one, you're going to save it because you want to save it, and nobody in this world works harder for what they want than you do.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“If my life had no meaning there was no reason not to end it.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“It's like...I can throw away my whole life trying to help somebody else, but i can only do something for me if I know it doesn't matter.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“Just because I don’t like you very much doesn’t mean I don’t love you,” said Kessler. “I raised you for ten years; you’re my daughter whether you like it or not.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“More and more," said Heron, reaching a distance about ten feet away from him, and slowly circling to the side. "Kira, sweetie, I'm going to murder your dad.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“That chick makes the monsters under my bed have nightmares.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“Moral," said Vale."That's an interesting adjective to apply to 'genocide'.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“The rain would fall, the plants would grow, the animals would eat and kill and die and grow again, and the ghost of sentient life would fade away, an insignificant blip in the memory of the Earth. Someday, a million years away, maybe a billion, when another species evolved or awoke or descended from the stars, would they even know that anybody had been here?”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“What happened to you was done out of a fear of extinction, and while that doesn't make it excusable, it at least makes it understandable.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“Last of all, this book owes perhaps its biggest debt to the ultimate models for Kira and Heron and every other awesome girl in the Partials series: my two daughters. May you always have heroines to inspire you, role models to look up to, and the freedom and courage to make your own choices, no matter how simple or scary or hard or eternal they may be.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“She would worry about Samm and Marcus when she wasn’t running for her life.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“The most important thing you can ever know is that no matter what your purpose is, that's not your only choice.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“I want to talk to you," she said, "for hours and days and forever, but we can't right now. Not here, and not while we're still in danger.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“You're not even happy. You're throwing away your own life because you love someone who's not here anymore, and you hate it, and it's killing you. Love is the worst thing that ever happened to you, but you still love her.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins

“Love is when you find something so great, so . . . necessary, that it becomes more important to you than your own goals, than your own life—not because your life has no meaning without it, but because it gives your life a meaning it never had before.”
― Dan Wells, Ruins