We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.
I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I’ll be waiting for you there.
…there ain’t no journey what don’t change you some.
Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are.
The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.
Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.
Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one’s core.
Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it.
Our ancestors built temples for their gods. We build department stores.
Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat inside a box you can never ever open.
Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I’ve stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.
If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.
As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.
Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman.
Go on, my dear,” urges the snake. “Take one. Hear it? ‘Pluck me,’ it’s saying. That big, shiny red one. ‘Pluck me, pluck me now and pluck me hard.’ You know you wan
I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People.
Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.
Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.
What’s the book like?””Well, some of it’s twaddle, but mostly it’s just piffle. Cheers!
Pain is strong, aye – but friends’ eyes, more strong.” I told him that he knows next to nothing about me & I know nothing about him. He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation.
Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people’s women who pay the most.
Have you noticed,” said John, “how countries call theirs ‘sovereign nuclear deterrents,’ but call the other countries’ ones ‘weapons of mass destruction’?
. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.
…..it’s hard to describe a psychosoteric battle at close quarters….. Think of those tennis-ball firing machines, but loaded with hand-grenades trapped in a shipping container, on a ship caught in a force-ten gale.
Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. “I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?
A weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously.
Women, oh, women! They’ll find the baddest meanin’ in your words an’ hold it up, sayin’, Look what you attacked me with!
There no such thing as something! Why? Because everything’s already turning into something else!
Nothing attunes you to the beauty of the quotidian like a man who decides not to kill you after all
A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.
Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.
Glass & peace alike betray proof of fragility under repeated blows.
One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards will be at one’s throat all the sooner.
Disco’s are tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don’t.
I’ve never listened to music lying down. Listening’s reading if you close your eyes.Music’s a wood you walk through.
In the Belgian backwaters, south of Bruges, there lives a reclusive English composer, named Vyvyan Ayrs. You won’t have heard of him because you’re a musical oaf, but he’s one of the greats.
A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant
there’re times when i suspect that the mind has a mind of its own. it shows us pictures. pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. this mind’s mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice
The learnin’ mind is the livin’ mind… an’ any sort o’ smart is truesome smart, old smart or new, high smart or low.
Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects.
The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.
Power and moneyLike Pooh Bear and honeyStick fast.
Not a clue – and, no, I don’t touch drugs. The world’s unstable enough without scrambling your brain for kicks.
Do,” said Louisa finally, “whatever you can’t not do.
A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat
The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane.
Any society’s upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d’you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.
When I’m in doubt – as I am now – I ask myself, ‘What would Carl Jung do?’ – and act accordingly.
Books’ll be back,” Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. “Wait till the power grids start failing in the 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.
The Future,” says Ian, in a film-trailer voice. “Coming soon, to a Present near you.
The library refused many downloads, of course, but I succeeded with two Optimists translated from the Late English, Orwell and Huxley;
So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .
But you have read Madame Bovary?’ (I’d never heard of her books.) ‘No.
The art teacher’s scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. ‘As the title suggests,’ Mr Dunwoody saw the book’d caught my attention, ‘it’s about the history of opticians. What are you about?
The truth of a myth, your Honor, is not its words but its patterns.
I wish, he thinks, spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket.
Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you’re afraid of them.
You say you’re ‘depressed’ – all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn’t mean you’re defective – it just means you’re human.
Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better.
I’d love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I’d love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I’d be one day to look inside it.
Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.
Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.
It’s a very special talent that men have, to possess seeing eyes yet be so blind.
This is my moral. Trust what you dream. Not what you think.
The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it’s the study of historians’ studies. . . .Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.
…it’s not just the person who fills a house, it’s their I’ll be back later!s, their toothbrushes and unused hats and coats, their belongingnesses.
When you win, the rules change, and you find you’ve lost
There’s no future in stories…Stories are things of the past, things for museums.
I recalled my father-in-law’s aphorism “To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom…” & I pretended to extract a speck from my eye.
And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better.
Only one-tenth of what you write will make it into your manuscript, but when you knock on that tenth” – I rap my knuckles on the table – “you’ll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue.
I added ‘writers’ to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.
If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.
It’s a bizarre act of self-mutilation to say that ‘I don’t get on with science fiction and fantasy, therefore I’m never going to read any’. What a shame. All those great books that you’re cutting yourself off from.
Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.
Sometimes language can’t even read the music of meaning.
Don’t worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well.
Photos’re better than nothing, but things’re better than photos ’cause the things themselves were part of what was there.
…that human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too.
Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction
What man ain’t the honestest cove in his own eyes?” Grote’s round face is a bronze moon in the dark. “‘Tain’t good intentions what paves the road to hell: it’s self-justifyin’s.
The potatoes were starch grenades. The canned carrots were revolting because that is their nature.
Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I’m working for Nintendo.
Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs.
The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature.
Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless.
When a woman is interested in you, she’ll let you know; if not, there’s no aftershave, gift, or line you can spin to make her change her mind.
Only I don’t close my eyes these days, because it hurts too much when I open them.
But this isn’t a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she’d be a person.
Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat.” “Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey-believe me.” “But most writers are lunatics, Bat-believe me. The human world is made up of stories, not people.
When you write it, don’t write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don’t try to give an explanation. Just say that I don’t know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.
So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?
Rootlessness,” I opine, “is the twenty-first century norm.””You’re not wrong and that’s why we’re in the shit we’re in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker’s toss about anywhere?
Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don’t respect cowards.
The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.
You groan and shake your head, Sixsmith, I know, but you smile too, which is why I love you.
Holly rubs her temples. “Are we talking … vampires?”Arkady groans. “On, the V-word! Here it comes again.
Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences.
But thought has no eyelids to close or ears to block…
Patience’s design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins. How pointless is that?
Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.
I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans.
Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. “Oy!” yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. “There’s a fackin’ q
& everywhere he observed that casual brutality lighter races show the darker.
This, explained the angel, is hell. The people do not love each other. They only want to feed themselves.
But to what end? Some… future revolution? It can never succeed.As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.
Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous.
A sprinkle of last-minute despair gives a soul an agreeably earthy aftertaste.
A single night is stuffed with minutes, but they leak out, one by one.
Young mothers are the most vicious tribe in the world if you don’t fit in.
Me and Vinny are dead careful, and we only had sex once without a condom, our first time, and it’s a scientific fact that virgins can’t get pregnant. Stella told me.
…if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one.
On bad days you wonder, ‘Why not just back off from the war and lead a quiet metalife?
Anna would like you, he thinks, looking into her face. Anna would like you.
Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going.
Lady Moon rose an’ gazed o’er my busted’n’beautsome Valleys with silv’ry’n’sorryin’ eyes, an’ the dingos mourned for the died uns.
After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him.
I find a certain comfort,” confesses Marinus, “in humanity’s helplessness.
All the supernatural yarns need a realist explanation and a supernatural one.
I asked, how is knowledge found? ‘You must learn how to read, little sister,’ he said.
At dawn the waves looked like mountain ranges tipped with gold as sunbeams slanted low under burgundy clouds.
Laughter is an anarchic blasphemy. Tyrants are wise to fear it.
it’s like the British in Ireland in 1916’ , says Oisir O’Dowd. ‘The repeated the ageless macho mantra, “Force is the only thing these natives understand,” so often that they ended up believing it . From that point they were doomed.
Lying’s wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.
The sun was deaf’nin’ so high up, yay, it roared an’ time streamed from it.
Your leaders must know powerful magic. Yes, said one of the women. The magic is called Marx, Stalin, Lenin and Class Dialectics. It didn’t sound like very powerful magic to me.
Orito banishes all thoughts of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet.
In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind.
As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I’m still looking for the door.
Politicians and sports coaches both need to be smart enough to master the game, but dumb enough to think it matters.
If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she extemporized, corpocracy would be finished.
Will I be some kid’s dad one day? Are any future people lurking deep inside mine?…Which girl’s carrying the other half of my kid, deep in those intricate loops? What’s she doing right now? What’s her name?
If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.
Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don’t remember summer even saying goodbye.
I’d always worried but kissing’s not so tricky. Your lips know what to do, just like sea anenomes know what to do. Kissing spins you, like Flying Tea-Cups. Oxygen the girl breathes out, you breathe in.
He thinks of the all steps that gathered this party and marvels at the weaverless looms of fortune.
She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.
Neither of us had anything to say, or rather we had everything to say, but after all those nights of not saying a word, we suddenly found we had not one dollar of time left between us.
Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me.
Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.
Now I seen Mauna Kena from Honokaa b’fore, o’course, but a mountain you’re planning on climbin’ ain’t the same as the one you ain’t. It ain’t so pretty, nay.
Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.
If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is.
A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice.
Every relationship has its own language. It takes a long time to evolve and read one another. Just as it’s true for people, it’s also true on a national or cultural level.