Shift Quotes
"The truth is going to get out – it always does – but it’s going to blend in with all the lies."
"Denial is the secret sauce in this town. It’s the flavor that holds all the other ingredients together."
"We didn’t come here and find open space. We got a bunch of people sick, killed them, and made space."
"It’s in our nature to dream of open space, to find room to spread out in."
"If you want to protect something, it takes sacrifice."
"Sometimes a soldier just needs to hear that it’s okay to see someone."
"The profession’s come a long way. They have pills now that can help her with the battle fatigue."
"Life is about the bad stuff that slips away. All the unimportant things, we remember well."
"Everything in the Legacy is true. It’s the allowed truth."
"It’s hard to prove you killed people who’d already been pronounced dead."
"The truth was, the player won or lost the very moment the computer shuffled the deck. The rest was simply a process of finding out."
"I’ll be sure to give Helen your regards."
"For a computer game, it was absurdly low-tech."
"Time to collapse in his office bathroom and cry until snot ran down his chin."
"But lesser wounds resurfaced. The bouts of sudden sadness had to be coming from somewhere."
"It was strangely satisfying to be told this by a home-made game – told that he had done a good job."
"Perhaps the game’s numbing powers were the reason it existed at all."
"He got it wrong himself, often calling them bunkers instead of silos."
"SILO TWELVE WAS collapsing, and by the time Troy and the others arrived, the communication room was awash in overlapping radio chatter and the stench of sweat."
"You need to lock yourself in the holding cell."
"The only difference between the people in silo twelve and the people in silo thirteen is that there won’t be future generations growing up in silo twelve. That’s it."
"Children used to be our legacy, right? They were our chance to cheat death, to pass these little bits of ourselves along."
"And then the darkness took him, tightening down around anything from his past that his mind deemed too awful to bear."
"I’m starting to think we’re building them too."
"I know we’ll get through this, but what about everyone else?"
"Every generation is waiting longer and longer to pull the trigger."
"This is one of those things they said would never get done, and he’s doing it."
"Tomorrow is our last chance to prepare, to make everything right."
"In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years."
"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."
"Life is a journey that must be traveled no matter how bad the roads and accommodations."
"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time."
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
"In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity."
"We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future."
"We weren’t there yet with our own work, and everything from Iran and Syria was much cruder. Now, North Korea had some elegant designs. I had my money on them. What they had already built could’ve taken out most of us."
"When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we destroy him."
"For every sot like me, there’s ten more out there trying to tear things down. And it only takes one of them to get lucky."
"He said that sitting there, watching you people work at your desks, getting to know you – he often thought that the world would be a better place with people like you in charge."
"It’s always been a cruel world. I spent my whole life looking for ways to make it better, to patch things up, dreaming of an ideal."
"It was the man-made part that would’ve caused the chaos. It would be knowing that people were out to get us, that there was danger in the air we breathed."
"The world outside isn’t just being scrubbed of humans right now, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s being reset."
"I knew what they could do, how fast they could restructure themselves, evolve, if you will."
"You think on the bad to remind yourself of the good."
"A tip. But only if you solve a riddle." - Drexel
"The contents weigh the same. The bag of feathers would have to be bigger... it weighs more." - Mission
"The apothecarist’s annoyance was worth far more than the tip." - Narration
"May your steps rise to the heavens." - Lyn to Mission
"He wasn’t afraid of life or death. He had embraced both in an act of sacrifice." - Narration about Mission's Mother
"Humans have this disease, this compulsion to move until we bump into something." - Thurman
"I could study the Order, and all I saw were the words, not the implications." - Donald
"Be better if someone like you were in charge." - Erskine to Donald
"The power in the hallway went out, leaving them in the pitch black." - Narration
"What is this I hear about my Rodny?" - Mrs Crowe
"Not the fighting. The fighting I've seen. I could paint a picture of the fighting and hang it from my walls."
"Rodny is in no danger. He is with the old books. He’s with the people who took the world from us."
"Everything’s going to be okay. Come, help with the desks."
"Mission fell silent. He could see knowledge shining behind her old eyes, a sunrise on the day after a cleaning."
"Sleep my Darling, don’t you cry. I’m going to sing you a lullaby."
"The world may be better off without us."
"His pulse had blurred into a steady thrum."
"People hurried up and down the hall outside. The silo was in a panic."
"He wondered how long he could cling to it."
"What he wanted to know was why he was awake, why he was even alive."
"Perhaps someone had placed him in Thurman’s boots to keep digging."
"Every layer he’d peeled back so far possessed its share of lies, and he didn’t think he was done uncovering them."
"There were questions he wanted answers to. And now he was in a position to ask them."
"This was how the gods of old got in trouble, how they ended up smitten with mortals and tangled in their affairs."
"Donald wanted to tell them that she wouldn’t be coming back, that there was nothing beyond that rise, even though he secretly shared their dreams."
"He had to trust that time was passing at all."
"There were sockets with fifty numbers above them. Why only fifty levels?"
"He felt brave enough just listening to the men with the other radios fight."
"The days were much too full of the same."
"Jimmy thought about playing chase between the servers before he went to bed, but he had done that yesterday."
"Jimmy wondered if he could call another level."
"Donald wondered what this Bernard would say if the man ever saw a lift."
"The outside wasn’t as bad as he had been led to believe."
"Donald thought about the note she had left, asking Thurman to wake her."
"They would preserve the tale of silo forty and all those unfortunate facilities around them."
"He couldn’t stand the thought of you dying over there, alone."
"Jimmy’s world had been shrinking every day."
"And soon, he had limited himself to the back room with all the beds and the storerooms with their funny smells, until the only place he felt safe was on his makeshift cot by the computer desk, the sound of the radio crackling in the background."
"His hand trembled as he reached for the 1 and hit the 4 instead."
"There was a hollow thunk, the sound of awful finality."
"He needed to breathe and find another stash of canned food and water."
"He could check for ever and never be satisfied."
"The ghosts are watching, the corpses are laughing, my parents are missing."
"My name was Jimmy, but nobody calls me any longer."
"Solo didn’t set out one day to plumb the silo’s depths – it simply happened."
"The silo belonged to the insects in many ways."
"It became difficult to breathe, seeing that."
"There were blue skies and green grass out there, Charla! I saw it!"
"The corpses are laughing. They go quiet when I step over them."
"The silo is empty. It’s full of death from pit to rim."
"He was an expert in some things he’d rather not know."
"Some things you found just when you needed them."
"The hard things got easier the more you did them."
"Something heavy and cold weighed down one pocket and pressed against his thigh."
"Sometimes a thing needed opening before closure was found."
"There was no doubting what he was there to do."