The Atlas Six Quotes

“Regardless, what Tristan needed most emergently was to believe in something; to stop staring at the pieces and finally grasp the whole. He wanted to revel in his magic, not wrestle with it. He wanted something, somewhere, that he could understand.
He was pacing the painted room while he postured, furiously boring a path from the apse of the dome to the door. Movement didn’t help the blur of things he only half saw, but sitting still was not an option. He closed his eyes and reached out for something solid, feeling strands in the air. The wards of the house under Nico and Libby’s design were gridlike, difficult to disturb, like bars. He paused and tried something different: to be part of them, participant instead of observer.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“For what it’s worth,” he said, clapping a hand on Tristan’s shoulder, “the parts of you that you seem to loathe are hardly abhorrent at all.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“Let me go back in,” Parisa suggested, and Dalton’s brow furrowed, his gaze darting askance. They were alone in the reading room , but predictably he had other defenses to maintain. “I would understand better what’s there if you let me.”
“You say that like it’s a Minotaur,” Dalton said wryly. “Some monster inside a labyrinth.”
“A princess in a tower,” Parisa corrected, reaching up to brush the fabric of his collar. An intimate gesture, to remind him of their intimacy. “But princesses can be monstrous at times.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“There was love in him, too much and still insufficient, twisted and anguished and equal in consequence to fear. It was a type of love Parisa had seen before: easily corruptible. The love of something uncontrollable, invulnerable. A love enamored with its own isolation, too frail to love in return.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely.
The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste.
Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely.
The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste.
Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved.
Callum had always tended toward the assassins in the stories, the dutiful soldiers, those driven by personal reaction rather than on some larger moral cause. Perhaps it was a small role to serve on the whole, but at least it was rational, comprehensible beyond fatalistic. Take the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White, for example. An assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether humanity as a whole won or lost as a result of his choice? Unimportant. He didn’t raise an army, didn’t fight for good, didn’t interfere much with the queen’s other evils. It wasn’t the whole world at stake; it was never about destiny. Callum admired that, the ability to take a moral stance and hold it. It was only about whether the huntsman could live with his decision—because however miserable or dull or uninspired, life was the only thing that mattered in the end.
The truest truths: Mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In terms of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“His life at the Society was not uninteresting. It was methodical, habitual, but that was a consequence of life in any collective. Self-interest was more exciting—sleeping through the afternoon one day, climbing Olympus to threaten the gods the next— but it scared people, upset them. Tending to every whim made others unnecessarily combative, mistrustful. They preferred the reassurance of customs, little traditions, the more inconsequential the better. Breakfast in the morning, supper at the sound of the gong. It soothed them, normality. Everyone wanted most desperately to be unafraid and numb.
Humans were mostly sensible animals. They knew the dangers of erratic behavior. It was a chronic condition, survival. “My intentions are the same as anyone’s,” said Callum after a few moments. “Stand taller. Think smarter. Be better.”
“Better than what?”
Callum shrugged. “Anyone. Everyone. Does it matter?”
He glanced at Tristan over his glass and registered a vibration of malcontent.
“Ah,” Callum said. “You’d prefer me to lie to you.”
Tristan bristled. “I don’t want you to lie—”
“No, you want my truths to be different, which you know they won’t be. The more of my true intentions you know, the guiltier you feel. That’s good, you know,” Callum assured him. “You want so terribly to disassociate, but the truth is you feel more than anyone in this house.”
“More?” Tristan echoed doubtfully, recoiling from the prospect.
“More,” Callum confirmed. “At higher volumes. At broader spectrums.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“She feels nothing.”
Tristan’s brow furrowed. “A bit harsh, isn’t it?”
Libby Rhodes was an anxious impending meltdown whose decisions were based entirely on what she had allowed the world to shape her into. She was more powerful than all of them except for Nico, and of course she was. Because that was her curse: regardless of how much power she possessed, she lacked the dauntlessness to misuse it. She was too small-minded, too unhungry for that. Too trapped within the cage of her own fears, her desires to be liked. The day she woke up and realized she could make her own world would be a dangerous one, but it was so unlikely it hardly kept Callum up at night.
“It is for her own safety that she feels nothing,” Callum said. “It is something she does to survive.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“I hate it when you do that.”
“What?”
“Act like everything is some sort of a performance. Like you’re a machine replicating normal behaviors. ‘Call it bonding’, honestly.” Tristan glanced moodily into his glass. “Sometimes I wonder if you even understand what it means to care about someone else or if you’re just imitating the motions of whatever being human is meant to look like.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“What replaced feelings when there were none to be had? The absence of something was never as effective as the presence of something, or so Libby had thought then. She suggested they fill the space something; a trap of some kind, or possibly something nightmarish if Callum really wanted to build some sort of existential snare, but he disagreed. To be suspended in nothing, he said, was to lack all motivation, all desire. It was functional paralysis. To want neither to live nor die, but to never exist. Impossible to fight.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“He’d practice with that lately, closing off his senses. Disassociating, disintegrating, twisting the dials that separated his body from the ceaseless nature of itself. It was a simple forfeiture this time, relinquishing his rights to observe anything at all. Falling to his proverbial knees and saying yes, all right then, I yield.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“Ezra Mikhail Fowler was born as the earth was dying. There had been an entire fuss of it on the news for years, about the carbon crisis and how little time the ozone had left, leaving an entire generation to turn to their therapists and proclaim a collective, widespread existential despair. The United States had been awash in fires and floods for months, with only half the country believing they had any hand in its demolishment. Even the ones who still believed in a vengeful God had failed to see the signs.
Still, things would have to get much worse before they got better.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“Being scared was a bit like anise, like absinthe. A strange and arousing flavor. Being admired was golden, maple sweet. Being despised was a woodsy, sulfuric aroma, smoke in the nostrils; something to choke on when done properly. Being envied was tart, with a citrusy tang, like green apple.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“But do you know how infrequent people think?... With very rare exceptions, emotions are far stronger. And unlike thought, emotion can be easily manipulated.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“giving the whole group an antiestablishment grimace. It was such an uncanny juxtaposition, so acutely timed: the familiar sliver of youthful ennui (ambivalence in a strapless dress) and the empty chair next to her parents.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“Maybe she wasn't a damsel in distress, but it felt nice to be anchored to something before casting herself into the unknown.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“That was how all of science worked, anyway. They were all pieces of some other eventual thing. The atom was part of the atomic bomb. Cataclysm, carnage, world wars, subprime mortgage lending, bank bailouts. In Callum's mind, human history was interesting because of humans, not science.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“Can you strike a deal with the devil if it means getting what you want?”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“Knowledge is carnage. You can't have it without sacrifice.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“We are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal - that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“People think they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn or whatever. Either you are or you aren't, that sort of thing. Like some people naturally want things and others want nothing, but it's not true. You can be taught to want. You can be taught to crave. And you can also learn to starve.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“Because the problem with knowledge, Miss Rhodes, is its inexhaustible craving. The more of it you have, the less you feel you know," said Atlas. "Thus, men often go mad in search of it.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“A flaw of humanity," said Parisa, shrugging as they walked. "The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable same-ness.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“The problem with knowledge, is its inexhaustible craving. The more of it you have, the less you feel you know.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“It was the kind of look that reminded him she’d set him on fire the first time she’d met him without even batting an eye.
He’d like her more if she did it more often.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“They were binary stars, trapped in each other's gravitational field and easily diminished without the other's opposing force.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“and we have always been a species highly susceptible to the call of the distant unknown.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“Unluck,” Dalton repeated. “Hexes are of course the most direct form; intentional bad luck caused to the victim. The other two—” “Jinxes are inconveniences, entanglements,” said Libby. “And curses are deliberate harm?”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“Tending to every whim made others unnecessarily combative, mistrustful. They preferred the reassurance of customs, little traditions, the more inconsequential the better. Breakfast in the morning, supper at the sound of the gong. It soothed them, normality.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“Libby Roads was an anxious, impending meltdown whose decisions were based entirely on what she had allowed the world to shape her into. She was more powerful than all of them, except for Nico. And of course she was. Because that was her curse.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six