David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
30 quotes
"You only value something if you know it’ll end."
"This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator."
".....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."
"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."
"Nothing attunes you to the beauty of the quotidian like a man who decides not to kill you after all"
"...if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one."
"A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant"
"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."
"Nonfiction that smells like fiction is neither."
"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."
"Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better."
"Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief."
"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."
"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."
"Life’s more science-fictiony by the day."
"On bad days you wonder, ‘Why not just back off from the war and lead a quiet metalife?"
"Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless."
"At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind."
"Only I don't close my eyes these days, because it hurts too much when I open them."
"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?"