Top 200 Martha Wells Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “And “weak” wasn’t really the right word for what Shade meant. What he was trying to say was harder to express. It was giving in to feelings other people thought you were supposed to have about things that shouldn’t have happened to you in the first place, but were not like the actual feelings you did have. There wasn’t a word for that in Raksuran or Altanic or Kedaic or any other language Moon knew. Moon said, “It’s not weak.” The.”

— Martha Wells

152. “Not every problem can be solved by you trying to get yourself killed.”

— Martha Wells

153. “I couldn’t pin down what was bothering me. Scan was negative, and this far away from the team there was no ambient sound except the whisper through the air system. Maybe it was the lack of security camera access, but I’d been in worse places with no cameras. Maybe it was something subliminal. Actually, it felt pretty liminal. Pro-liminal. Up-liminal? Whatever, there was no knowledge base here to look it up.”

— Martha Wells

154. “Humans always think they’ve covered their tracks and deleted their data, but they’re wrong a lot.”

— Martha Wells

155. “I was still disoriented, and having a moment where I wondered if hey, maybe all the humans were right for once and this was a terrible idea.”

— Martha Wells

156. “I was depressed this morning. I’d tried watching some new serials last night and even they couldn’t distract me; reality was too intrusive.”

— Martha Wells

157. “This is why I didn’t want to come.”

— Martha Wells

158. “But they were humans – who knows why they did anything?”

— Martha Wells

159. “The station approach traffic was heavy, and we were showing a twenty-seven-minute docking delay. Twenty-seven minutes was more than enough time for me to do something stupid.”

— Martha Wells

160. “Oh, I’ve no sense of self-preservation,” Reynard replied easily. “That’s what I depend on you for.”

— Martha Wells

161. “You used combat override modules to make the DeltFall SecUnits behave like rogues. If you think a real rogue SecUnit still has to answer your questions, the next few minutes are going to be an education for you.”

— Martha Wells

162. “I guess if you were really determined, you could find a way to get yourself killed by exposing the power connectors under the panels and shielding and, I don’t know, licking them or something, but this dead human clearly hadn’t.”

— Martha Wells

163. “How humans decide what to do with their arms on a second by second basis, I still have no idea.”

— Martha Wells

164. “Humans can miss a lot of little clues, but me being able to fire energy weapons from my arms would be something of a red flag.”

— Martha Wells

165. “I really needed to get around to setting that one-second delay on my mouth.”

— Martha Wells

166. “There was a huge difference between knowing something happened and seeing the reality of it.”

— Martha Wells

167. “I had a stab wound so large you could see the metal of my interior structure, but Senior Indah was too polite to mention it. The medical bot extended a delicate sensor limb toward me. On the feed I told it anything that touched me would get torn off and thrown across the room. It pulled the limb back and used it to check Hostile Two instead.”

— Martha Wells

168. “I guess the feed isn’t adequate for all forms of communication, particularly those that involve a lot of glaring.”

— Martha Wells

169. “I suggested Target Four from the Lalow, who had all the characteristics of a human who could be talked into doing anything.”

— Martha Wells

170. “I had to run back the drone’s camera feed to catch up, I had been so busy conquering that burst of non-annoyance.”

— Martha Wells

171. “Maybe it was something subliminal. Actually, it felt pretty liminal. Pro-liminal. Up-liminal?”

— Martha Wells

172. “Humans do the “make it a question so it doesn’t sound so bad” thing and it still sounds bad.”

— Martha Wells

173. “But the fact remained that a tense situation just made McKay think faster. You could probably phrase it as an equation, where the increasing awfulness of whatever tight spot they were in was directly proportional to the speed of McKay’s ability to think a way out of it.”

— Martha Wells

174. “I could play it back to listen in on the whole conversation but I could also punch myself in the head with a sampling drill and I was not going to do that, either.”

— Martha Wells

175. “Just a regular projectile, not an explosive one, so most of my back was still there. I just didn’t feel like walking around leaking in front of humans right now.”

— Martha Wells

176. “There were three SecUnits who were not me on this planet, and that was dangerous enough.”

— Martha Wells

177. “The core cutter had powered up and accessed my feed to deliver a canned warning and a handy set of directions. Why yes, I did want to disengage the safety protocols, thanks for asking.”

— Martha Wells

178. “Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don’t have emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now.”

— Martha Wells

179. “One of the Albons thought he should deliver his message in person, Sir, but some of the men pointed out that he was mistaken.” “Did they throw him down the stairs?” “A little, yes.”

— Martha Wells

180. “I didn’t stop in my tracks because I have a lot of practice in not physically reacting to things no matter how much they shock or horrify me.”

— Martha Wells

181. “It was a low-stress group, they didn’t argue much or antagonize each other for fun, and were fairly restful to be around, as long as they didn’t try to talk or interact with me in any way.”

— Martha Wells

182. “Even the humans think about killing the humans, especially here. I hate mines, and mining, and humans who work in mining, and of all the stupid mines I can remember, I hate this stupid mine the most. But the humans hate it more.”

— Martha Wells

183. “On the shows I liked best, monsters were always a possibility in these situations, but in reality it only happened around 27 percent of the time. Also a joke. Mostly.”

— Martha Wells

184. “It was called Worldhoppers, and was about freelance explorers who extended the wormhole and ring networks into uninhabited star systems. It looked very unrealistic and inaccurate, which was exactly what I liked.”

— Martha Wells

185. “Sometimes you have to look into every possibility, even the dumb ones.”

— Martha Wells

186. “I hate it when humans and augmented humans ruin things for no reason. Maybe because I was a thing before I was a person and if I’m not careful I could be a thing again.”

— Martha Wells

187. “Somewhere there had to be a happy medium between being treated as a terrifying murder machine and being infantilized.”

— Martha Wells

188. “I have small energy weapons built into both arms, but the one I went for was the big projectile weapon clamped to my back. The hostile that had just exploded up out of the ground had a really big mouth, so I felt I needed a really big gun.”

— Martha Wells

189. “I needed to have an emotion in private.”

— Martha Wells

190. “Did I mean a cilia or was that something else? They don’t give murderbots decent education modules on anything except murdering, and even those are the cheap versions.”

— Martha Wells

191. “Mensah underestimated my ability to ignore humans but I appreciated the thought.”

— Martha Wells

192. “I didn’t want to see helpless humans. I’d rather see smart ones rescuing each other.”

— Martha Wells

193. “Humans are nervous of me because I’m a terrifying murderbot, and I’m nervous of them because they’re humans.”

— Martha Wells

194. “Humans touch stuff all the time, I wish they wouldn’t.”

— Martha Wells

195. “Tural left with the air of escaping before things got worse.”

— Martha Wells

196. “I’ll give you one more answer. The words Bashasa spoke to me before he died were ‘Don’t let everything we fought for be for nothing.”

— Martha Wells

197. “There needs to be an error code that means “I received your request but decided to ignore you.”

— Martha Wells

198. “I had stopped watching it when the mutants dragged off the group’s biologist to eat him. Seriously, this was exactly the kind of situation I was designed to prevent.”

— Martha Wells

199. “I guess you could pay off the management to let you bring in a SecUnit and weapons and do a hostage exchange, but they drew the line at giving you free feed access.”

— Martha Wells

200. “The only people I’ve run into who actually want to get into conversations with SecUnits are my weird humans.”

— Martha Wells