Top 200 Martha Wells Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Can you be a trifle more obscure? I think I almost understood what you said that last time.”

— Martha Wells

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

— Martha Wells

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

— Martha Wells

154. “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

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

— Martha Wells

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Martha Wells

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Martha Wells

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Martha Wells

167. “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

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

— Martha Wells

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

— Martha Wells

170. “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

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

— Martha Wells

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

— Martha Wells

173. “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

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

— Martha Wells

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

— Martha Wells

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Martha Wells

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Martha Wells

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Martha Wells

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

— Martha Wells

189. “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

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

— Martha Wells

191. “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

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

— Martha Wells

193. “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

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

— Martha Wells

195. “For one thing, the shows and serials were trying to communicate accurately with the viewer. As far as I could tell, real humans usually didn’t know what the hell they were doing.”

— Martha Wells

196. “It had been such a stupid question, I had forgotten not to have an expression.”

— Martha Wells

197. “The company is like an evil vending machine, you put money in and it does what you want, unless somebody else puts more money in and tells it to stop.”

— Martha Wells

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

— Martha Wells

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

— Martha Wells

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

— Martha Wells