Survivor Quotes
"Survivor is really about our education system because I feel, more often than not, kids are taught to be the best possible cogs in some big corporate machine."
"The books are never about what you think they are about."
"This book would not exist without the Tuesday Night Writers' Workshop at Suzy's house."
"What you've found is the story of everything that went wrong."
"You can heat this wire to white-hot, and it will still tell you the exact same story."
"I'm not a murderer. And I'm alone up here. The Flying Dutchman."
"People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved."
"Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown."
"Most people who call me already know what they want."
"I can't live with knowing the future and not being able to save anyone."
"The world was passing by so fast outside the car my eyes went goofy."
"Every minute made it harder to do what I'd promised at my baptism."
"These people will do anything to make me look incompetent."
"The truth is, Adam was born first. And maybe Adam envied me because I would get to go out and see the outside world."
"The only names in Creedish culture were family names."
"The minutes were already taking me farther and farther away from what I should've done."
"Oh my gosh, this is working. Look how clean it gets underneath."
"Murders," the caseworker says. "Someone is maybe killing survivors and making it look like suicide."
"It's easy to imagine a killer, just one person or a hit squad of church members out to make sure you all get to Heaven together."
"The only new person I've met in months is Fertility Hollis."
"The other thing to remember is this might all have a natural explanation."
"Part of my job is gardening, so I spray everything with twice the recommended strength of poison."
"A shot of clear lacquer or hair spray stops silk flowers from fraying at the edge."
"The artificial lemon thyme I spray with Lemon Pledge furniture polish."
"God forbid I should try and look good for Fertility."
"Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine."
"You have to move all the furniture to another room, including the piano."
"If you're going to kill yourself, I can't stop you, and it's not my fault."
"Really I'm thinking, oh please, oh please, oh please, be there this afternoon Fertility Hollis."
"Her hair looks gathered in a field and piled on her head to dry."
"The Atlantic water was so clear. It was pouring down the grand staircase."
"The metal skeleton of the ship, the bulkheads behind the lining of paneling and tapestries, shuddered and groaned."
"He knew the ship was only going to sink about halfway."
"You can't imagine how beautiful it all was, the flooded ballrooms with pianos under water."
"We dance past statues of saints in somebody else's religion."
"I ask, does she have the same kind of dreams?"
"She says, 'No way would I shoot myself. I'd probably take pills.'"
"Walking around downtown, I pick up another receipt."
"The only side effect is now I tend to steal."
"My feet are walking down the sidewalk in the one slow, two fast steps of a waltz."
"If I turn up suicided in the morning, it was murder."
"The secret for making perfect boeuf Bourguignon is to add some orange peel."
"The secret is to not let your imagination get carried away."
"This isn't a schizoid fantasy. I'm not hallucinating."
"All night long, I'm cleaning. I can't sleep."
"Whatever my real problems might be, I didn't want them cured."
"The caseworker cured me of a hundred syndromes, none of them real, and then declared me sane."
"The caseworker does most of her breathing through a cigarette."
"With numbers like that every night, if there is a killer, he doesn't need to kill anybody."
"According to my daily planner book, this shouldn't take me more than half an hour."
"What I'm busy telling the police all morning is I left the caseworker still alive."
"It's not as if the great coyote spirit comes to you, but around the eighty-first floor, these random thoughts just catch in your head."
"Silly things the agent told you, now they add up."
"Your body is a temple, mine was a real fixer-upper."
"Around the ninetieth floor, every thought is an epiphany."
"The deeper meaning of everything is right there in your face."
"If Jesus Christ had died in prison, with no one watching and with no one there to mourn or torture him, would we be saved?"
"The key to salvation is how much attention you get."
"You realize that people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world."
"You realize that there's no point in doing anything if nobody's watching."
"Our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past."
"You don't feel a thing, but you can fuck for hours."
"If you worry about disaster all the time, that's what you're going to get."
"Today Is the Worst Day of the Rest of Your Life."
"I've been schlepping this for the last half hour. Make yourself useful."
"It's hard for someone in the outside world to imagine how completely trained we were."
"No matter how carefully you choose, you'll never be totally happy."
"You don't have to control everything. You can't control everything."