Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.
If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Overlong, detailed to the point of distraction-and ultimately, without a major resolution.
Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It’s the crack cocaine of the literary world.
If it weren’t for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.
I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!
Mr. McGregor’s a nasty piece of work, isn’t he? Quite the Darth Vader of children’s literature.
Death doesn’t care about personalities – he’s more interested in meeting quotas.
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.
the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.
I shouldn’t believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you.
I didn’t set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind.
Bowden Cable is the sort of honest and dependable operative that is the backbone of SpecOps. They never win commendations or medalsand the public has no knowledge of them at all. They are all worth ten of people like me.
Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable.
Religion isn’t the cause of wars, it’s the excuse.
I’ve managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years,” she announced with some small sense of achievement. “I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade.
How about this,’ I said. ‘We modify our plans with regard to ongoing facts as they become known to us, then remodify them as the situation unfolds. ‘You mean make it all up as we go along?’ asked Perkins.’Right.
Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.
Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time.
Vanity’s contribution to Fiction in general was an abundance of cheap labour and the occasional blockbuster, which was accepted into Fiction with an apologetic ‘gosh, don’t know how that happened’.
Pretend to be mad and talk a lot. Then — and this is the important bit — do nothing at all until you absolutely have to and then make sure everyone dies.
Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought–and more reading.
History has rewritten itself so many times I’m not really sure how it was to begin with — it’s a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it’s been repainted eight times.
Now and again. Good residency is about having the power to ask someone to do something, but not necessarily exercising it.
Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.
So you’re going to have to ask yourselves on simple question: Which one of us is speaking now?
I’m sure it’s not all hot buttered crumpets out there in the breathing world of asphalt and heartbeats.
The very possibility of death focuses the mind wonderfully.
Fiction wouldn’t be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.
Chromatacia…society…ruled by a colortocracy…social hierarchy based upon one’s limited color perception, society is dominated by color. In this world, you are what you can see.
Those that can be troubled to muse upon the meaning of life are general disappointed when they figure it out.
That’s the thing about destiny: It can’t be predicted, and it’s usually pretty odd.
And we kissed again. It was a warm, indescribably lovely feeling. But it was more than just physical. It was a dialogue between two young people with high ideals and a Big Plan. It was about belonging, secrets, partnership, commitment.
Before, I suspected I might not amount to anything, and now I now I won’t, so at least it takes away the wearisome burden of delusive hope
Soothsayers are like that. They see many futures but never their own.
The sky was like ebony and the only illumination was the harsh white light of the central streetlamp, which cast shadows so hard it seemed you might cut yourself on them.
…although her mouth uttered fond words, her eyes spoke only venom.
For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.
Rouge of my heart, intertwined with double-hued destiny,Thread of my thoughts, constant and rubicund legacy,Filament of my future, endeared unto my expectation,Cord of my emotion, seared with eternal elation.
7. 3. 12. 31. 208: Reckless disrespect of the lightless hours will not be tolerated.
People don’t change just because you know more about them.
Though his death would not fill me with any sense of sadness, I would probably feel the loss. Even enemies are part of one.
Yes, and imagine a world where there were no hypothetical situations.
Love and magic are like oil and water–they just don’t mix.
Magic is the fifth fundamental force and is even more mysterious than gravity, which is really saying something.
The only way to write is to write. Writers write. And when they’ve written, they write some more.
True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good–and we all know how rare that is…
Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.
Sometimes, a word succeeds beyond the wildest dreams of its creators, like a virus sent into the world to infect common speech.
I think Wordsworth was as surprised to see me as I was him. It can’t be usual to go to your favorite memory only to find someone already there, admiring the view ahead of you.
Prejudice is a product of ignorance that hides behind barriers of tradition.
I’m beginning to think you’re the sort of person who does a great deal with very little.”He meant a liar.
The cucumber and the tomato are both fruit; the avocado is a nut. To assist with the dietary requirements of vegetarians, on the first Tuesday of the month a chicken is officially a vegetable.
In fact, the room was so quiet you might have heard a drop of paint splash.
Keep your head down, Edward. Those that see too much quickly find themselves seeing nothing at all.
Believe me, you’re going to have to do much worse than this–in the pursuit of freedom, the innocents will suffer–and at your hands.
There’s more to good or bad than what’s written in the Rulebook.
Never underestimate the capacity for romance, no matter what the circumstances.
You’re just a huge romantic at heart, aren’t you?””If there’s cash involved, I’m anything you want me to be.
You have many fine qualities that I admire. But you are out of time. You should have been born a century ago, when values such as yours meant something.
I am boring, but I’m ok with it. I’m the anchor, the shoulder…I’m an average man…with a truly extraordinary wife
Comedy was one of those genres that while appearing quite jolly was actually highly dangerous.
You want me to spy on a National Colour operative?”Wow,’ she said, ‘you got it. I thought I was going to have to explain that one for a lot longer.
I got mixed up with some oddness in my youth, and the long and short of it is that I can’t shuffle off this mortal coil until I have read the ten most boring classics.
Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corrpution and error hardwired at inception.
Those that see too much quickly find themselves seeing nothing at all.
Curiosity is a descending stair…that leads to only who-knows-where.
Sometimes I wonder if the human race isn’t collectively as mad as a sack of door knobs.
Honor is kind of what you get when you weaponize manners
Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isn”t what it used to be?
You’re talking about gold and silver, cash and securities. I’m talking about the sheer beauty of the land, the value of unpolluted parkland made wild and staying wild forever.
Truly competent Literary Detectives are as rare as truthful men, Mr. Tweed — you can see her potential as clearly as I can. Frightened of someone stealing your thunder, perhaps?
What is without dispute…is that the readers need [the BookWorld] just as much as we need them—to bring order to their apparent chaos, if nothing else.
Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty points off the TomJones Index.
I was in ’78 recently,” he announced. “I brought you this.”He handed me a single by the Beatles. I didn’t recognize the title.”Didn’t they split in ’70?””Not always. How are things?
I wasn’t particularly worried; running is overrated anyway, and sport only makes you sweaty and smug and wears out the knees.
Honor is kind of what you get when you weaponize manners …
…the known had been so long dwarfed by the unknown that confusion was an easy bedfellow.
Marriage is an honorable estate and should not be used simply as an excuse for legal intercourse.
A surfeit of information often hides an untruth,” he said, with annoying clarity.
So my humor, I’d say, comes from a mixture of lowbrow comedy shows and highbrow theater. It’s an interesting mix.
I hope that in my books there’s an undertone of politics, basic tenets of how we should live.