Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World
13 quotes
"The sergeants are shunted forward and they blink and stare up at Gonzo as he leans on the edge of his giant mixing bowl. MacArthur never addressed his troops from a mixing bowl--not even one made from a spare geodesic radio emplacement shell--and certainly de Gaulle never did. But Gonzo Lubitsch does, and he does it as if a whole long line of commanders were standing at his shoulder, urging h"
"Newton's work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future."
"Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe."
"Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway."
"Gonzo's father told his son to grieve without reservation or embarrassment until he could grieve solemnly and inwardly, and then finally to hang up his tears and wear them only occasionally, as befits the true men of the heart. Grief is not a thing to be ashamed of or suppressed, he told Gonzo. Nor yet is it a thing to cherish. Feel it, inhabit it and leave it behind. It is right, but it is not the end."
"Now, are those engaged in the business of governing any different by nature from those they govern?""Yes. They're prideful and tend to sexual misconduct. Also, the situation of being in government tends to drive you mad.""But are they more virtuous or more intelligent? Or more compassionate?""Ha!""Let's call that one a 'no."
"No. The moral of the story in so far as it has one is that cannibals can study logic, and that if you are going to leave the path, you better have your wits about you and know better than to trust the first scary old lady who talks to you in public."
"What will you tell him?""The truth."Fortismer thinks about that."Yes," he says at last. "Probably the best thing. Bloody deceptive, honesty."
"This place does not feel like my country. It feels like countries I have read about where things are very bad. It feels, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing we were protesting against, but we thought it was elsewhere. It is not heartening to find that it has come to us."
"Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather more felicitously: the tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster."
"Nowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient."
"Are you addicted if there is simply no reason for you to do anything else?"
"Because for Gonzo, anything which may explode at any moment is clearly a girl."