The Water Knife
Paolo Bacigalupi
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Pure data. You don’t believe data—you test data.” He grimaced. “If I could put my finger on the moment we genuinely fucked ourselves, it was the moment we decided that data was something you could use words like believe or disbelieve around.”
“If we can’t describe our reality accurately, we can’t see it.”
“People only really live when they’re about to die,” he said. “Before then it’s all a waste. You don’t appreciate how good it is until you’re really in the shit.”
“if we don’t have the right words in our vocabularies, we can’t even see the things that are right in front of our faces.”
“Some people had to bleed so other people could drink. Simple as that.”
“Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans -- vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.”
“Lucy woke to the sound of rain. A benediction, gently pattering. For the first time in more than a year, her body relaxed. The release of tension was so sudden that for a moment she felt as if she were filled with helium. Weightless. All her sadness and horror sloughed off her frame like the skin of a snake, too confining and gritted and dry to contain her any longer, and she was rising. She was new and clean and lighter than air, and she sobbed with the release of it. And then she woke fully, and it wasn’t rain caressing the windows of her home but dust, and the weight of her life came crushing down upon her once again.”
“There were stories in sweat. The sweat of a woman bend double in an onion field, working fourteen hours under the hot sun, was different from the sweat of a man as he approached a checkpoint in Mexico, praying to La Santa Muerte that the federales weren't on the payroll of the enemies he was fleeing... Sweat was a body's history, compressed into jewels, beaded on the brow, staining shirts with salt. It told you everything about how a person had ended up in the right place at the wrong time, and whether they would survive another day.”
“You didn’t judge people for caving under pressure; you judged them for those few times when they were lucky enough to have any choice at all.”
“It was a view of the world that anticipated evil from people because people always delivered. And the worst part was that she couldn’t really argue.”
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Book Keywords:
belief, data, skepticism, climate-change, development, land-use, information, disbelief, environmentalism, water, theories, water-use, facts, land, drought
