Borne Quotes
"I didn’t know what Borne would mean to us. I couldn’t know that he would change everything."
"Come close, I could smell the brine, rising in a wave."
"Instead, for a dangerous moment, this thing I’d found was from the tidal pools of my youth."
"To find Borne, I had tracked Mord all morning."
"No one, not even Wick, knew why the Company hadn’t seen the day coming when Mord would transform from their watchdog to their doom."
"Mord had claws and fangs that could eviscerate, extinguish, quick as thought."
"Mord destroyed and reimagined our broken city for reasons known only to him."
"Many a scavenger, surveying that very flank I now contemplated, had misjudged the depth of Mord’s sleep."
"The drug was the first thing Wick offered me when I met him."
"Wick smiled the thin smile of a thin man, which looked more like a wince."
"We were bound by our mutual safe place: the Balcony Cliffs."
"We could not be seen outside together—left by different pathways, at different times."
"I knew nothing about Borne and treated him like a plant at first."
"I upgraded Borne from plant to animal, but still did not reclassify him as 'purposeful.'"
"You have no right, Rachel," he said, and there was a wounded quality to the word right.
"I am not a machine. I am a person. Just like you, Rachel. Just like you."
"I mix it up. I am supposed to mix it up. In the white light."
"I found myself when you picked me up! I was found by you. You plucked me. You plucked me."
"Yes, everything has a purpose. And every person has a purpose, or finds a purpose."
"Am I a person?" Borne said, and his eyestalks perked up and took special attention.
"I saw these conversations as Borne playful. But really it was a youthful, still-forming mind that couldn’t yet communicate complex concepts through language."
"I’m going outside. I’m going on a scavenging run. I’ll be back before dark."
"I was in a dark place. Only it was filled with light. I was alone. Only there were others like me. I was dead. We were all… dead."
"Because if not, then Borne is the most efficient creature I’ve ever seen."
"It’s too dangerous here now. Too dangerous on our own."
"Mord is beautiful. Mord is strong. Mord is not nice."
"What are they? Are they… lights like in the Balcony Cliffs? Or… electrical lights? Who turned them on?"
"He kills the stars. He kills the stars and brings darkness."
"Survival isn't pretty. We're trying to survive."
"You have to give up something to get somewhere."
"We're lucky, after such strife, to be able to choose between a homegrown tyrant and a Company-grown tyrant."
"We could starve away in the Balcony Cliffs and he'd just absorb a chair or something to keep on living."
"Happiness never came easy to Wick. Happiness in the moment eluded him without his alcohol minnows, his memory beetles."
"The quest to make the Balcony Cliffs safe was futile. There would always be a way in."
"We didn't try hard enough. We were preyed upon. We had no discipline."
"We're locked into these positions from the beginning."
"You owe me. You need to tell me something, anything, about what's going on."
"I'm learning too much too fast already. It fills me up, and I can't stop."
"I keep searching for what Borne was thinking, how he was thinking it."
"All I know is that I had put my body in front of Wick, in defense of Wick."
"I didn’t mean to hurt him. I wasn’t going to hurt him. You startled me, Rachel. You made me."
"I wanted to help. I wanted you both to be nice to each other."
"That wasn’t for you to decide. That wasn’t right for you to decide."
"I love you," Borne said in my voice. "But I’m scared of you and can’t trust you."
"Should I have let Wick take you for parts, Borne? What are you?"
"But I am a person," Borne said. "Rachel told me—I’m a person!"
"I won’t ever know another person like you," Borne said.
"You’ll be better off," I lied. "It won’t be as bad as you think," I lied.
"Will I ever see you again, Rachel?" Borne asked.
"I thought of Borne and his extra senses. I thought of the Company and Mord."
"Be at peace," I told them. "Be at peace now and let no one recruit you for their stupid games."
"Everything was in there. Everything I’d done to help him and everything I’d done that hadn’t."
"Rachel can’t protect me from Mord, and I can’t protect her from me."
"I met a kind fox today. She was following me and I meant to eat her, but she wouldn’t let me."
"My earliest memory is of a lizard pooping on me and ever since I have hated lizards."
"The world is broken and I don’t know how to fix it."
"I would never know anyone like Borne ever again."
"I had memorized everything I could understand, everything in a language I knew."
"If there’s nothing to eat in the pack, Rachel, it doesn’t matter anyway. Let a bit of the Balcony Cliffs live on here. Why not?"
"Food for a week," Wick said. "Water forever. Well, at least for a lot longer than the food."
"Stay here and die in the dark with the snails or try for the north and die in the light? Leave you to your fate? I don’t think so."
"No kind of biotech at all," Wick said. "I have no idea how it got in my pocket. I have no idea how it got there. No one made it. It was an egg. Something laid it in my pocket. Isn’t that amazing?"
"You let it go." Mock disapproval, still playing, but after Borne it wasn’t the same.
"Can we carry this place around with us on our backs while we forage for food?"
"The only place that I might find more is in the Company building," Wick said.
"He liked bird-watching and we ate lunches together and he read so many books. He was curious about so many things."
"I’m telling you, Rachel, I can’t anymore. I’m not built like you. I’m not human. I’m not a person."
"I was made to absorb. I was made to kill. I know that now. And it’s no use."
"You’re beautiful. So beautiful. And someone beautiful wouldn’t hurt me."
"Caring came later. And I didn’t see the harm."
"We always have a choice, even if the choice is amnesia or your own death."
"Life is struggle. It placed me in some gray realm beyond, a landscape of exertion and anguish."
"I prefer the old betrayals, the ones based on trust."
"We live, we stand by each other and make do with what we have."
"Life is still hard, but it is fair, and there is more joy in it that doesn’t feast on heartbreak."
"The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we’re alive."
"We sit on the balcony on the good days, Wick and I, and we hold hands and look out at the light on the river at dusk."