Dry Quotes
"The kitchen faucet makes the most bizarre sounds. It coughs and wheezes like it’s gone asthmatic. It gurgles like someone drowning."
"Ever since single-handedly remodeling our kitchen, Dad has had delusions of plumbing grandeur."
"Everyone’s going to remember where they were when the taps went dry, I think. Like when a president is assassinated."
"Uncle Basil emerges from his vapor cloud long enough to ask, 'What’s going on?'"
"Everyone chuckles. Not because it’s particularly funny, but it eases some of the tension."
"'Okay,' my dad finally says, 'which one of you pissed off Arizona and Nevada?'"
"The best way to conserve water right now is to hold onto the water your body already has."
"The Frivolous Use Initiative wasn’t just about banning water balloons. It also made it illegal to fill up private pools."
"It’s not that I didn’t know it wouldn’t be working—of course I did. But when you’re on morning autopilot, routine and muscle memory know no reason."
"Garrett has just tainted the only water we have."
"The perimeter of the aquatics center is now guarded by soldiers with automatic rifles."
"It’s not just that I’m angry, it’s because I have to know. I need to kill the maybe."
"Don’t cry over spilt milk, honey. Or poisoned water."
"It’s moments like these, seeing them together, that make me appreciate the family I have."
"With my dad, the embers of armageddon will quickly grow into a full-on blazing apocalypse in his head."
"You’re just going to stand there and let my wife’s breast milk run dry?"
"Roger, I’m offering you a gift much more valuable than a bottle of water. Self-reliance."
"Calm people quietly dying is a lot easier to deal with than angry people fighting for their lives."
"If you just read the quarterly public water reports, the numbers were right there."
"Real change requires prolonged pressure and inspired action. Raw. Tangible. Action."
"That required the mastery of a very special skill set."
"But desperate times call for desperate measures."
"It’s not like they just dump that water into the ocean. It’s purified."
"Sometimes being the hero means going down with the ship."
"Being a little bit thirsty will remind us why we need to ration."
"You could grind those up and squeeze at least a gallon out of them."
"You want to keep this for show, fine. But you’re not shooting anybody today."
"You have principles and you don’t want to compromise them—but I’m begging you, Richard."
"If you truly want to build wealth, you need to be trading up for appreciating assets."
"The greatest investors capitalize in times of crisis."
"Hope is a thing in constant motion, like a shark."
"This gated community has become a high-end morgue."
"The price of water has gone up. Don’t tell me that’s my fault."
"What’s the point of having all of this junk if you’re just going to get sick like the rest of them?"
"You don’t wait nearly a week until mobilizing serious resources for a disaster of this magnitude."
"Everything that I’ve traded for thus far will be peanuts compared to what my next transactions will bring."
"One must learn to manage one’s emotional state in order to consistently operate from a place of resourcefulness."
"Life is rife with many moments of misfortune, which we must learn to see as opportunities."
"The best way to honor them is to listen to them. To believe them."
"If we’re a messed up, dysfunctional family, I guess this can go down as our single functional moment."
"Everything in life is a lesson, Kelton. Learn from it. Better yourself. Become stronger."
"For a girl like her, whose first instinct is always to fix a situation, the 'nothing at all' choice isn’t easy."
"I can’t help but be a little intrigued by his unknown quotient."
"If he trusts me, maybe that makes me trustworthy."
"Sometimes it's the monsters who survive. And now I am the monster."
"If the fire doesn’t get her, she’ll die of thirst out here."
"But I won’t take it. Because even though I’ve seen everyone around me lose their humanity today, I realize that in this moment, I have finally found mine."
"The pain is beyond imagining now, but still I run."
"If I were at the shore now, I would drink it until it killed me."
"When we’ve lost the strength to save ourselves, we somehow find the strength to save each other."
"I don’t feel it. I feel like I died a hundred yards downhill, and now my spirit is trapped here."
"But there’s a sponge for soaping, a washcloth for rinsing, and a towel for drying."
"We’re old friends who’ve known each other for, like, a hundred years."
"The human body is sixty percent water. Well, now I know what the rest is. The rest is dust, the rest is ash, it’s sorrow and it’s grief. But above all that, in spite of all that, binding us together is hope. And joy. And a wellspring of all the things that still might be."