Jedediah Berry > Quotes

“She was beautiful, in the quiet way that lonely, unnoticed people are beautiful to those who notice them.”
― Jedediah Berry

“Love is the same as being lost,' says Jacques to the dark. 'Except you don't care that you're lost.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales

“The world is unkind to the shoeless and frolicsome.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“Woe to he who checkmates his opponents at last, only to discover they have been playing cribbage.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“If you are not setting a trap, then you are probably walking into one. It is the mark of the master to do both at once.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“A train will bring you back to the place you came from, but it will not return you home.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“She was beautiful, in the quiet way that lonely, unnoticed people are beautiful to those who notice them”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“I was to be buried inside my own creation, the better to keep its secrets. I will not tell you more, for your sake. But if you ask, I will answer.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“The coded message is a lifeless thing, mummified and entombed. To the would-be cryptologist we must offer the same advice we would give the grave-robber, the spelunker, and the sorcerer of legend: beware what you dig up; it is yours.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“There is no better way to understand your own motives and dispositions than by finding someone to act as your opposite.”
― Jedediah Berry

“A hat is a snake is a lamp is a child is an insect is a clothesline hung with telephones.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“What frightens us is the possibility that it will leave forever, and never come back, and take us with it when it goes.
It is taking me now, and I am frightened and alive and very much awake.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“Answer questions with questions. If you are caught in a lie, lie again. You do not need to know the truth to trick another into speaking it.       U”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“This meeting went on for some time, with only the weather having anything to say, and the weather spoke only of itself.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“He was the only person awake, but he might as well have been alone and dreaming.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“The problem is not belonging to one or the other, Mr. Unwin—and there is always an Agency, always a Carnival to belong to. The problem is belonging for too long to either of them.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“On Memory: Imagine a desk covered with papers. That is everything you are thinking about. Now imagine a stack of file drawers behind it. That is everything you know. The trick is to keep the desk and the file drawers as close to one another as possible, and the papers neatly stacked.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“All the world's a rube, and he who tries to prove otherwise will be the first to wake onstage, victim of our just ridicule.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“Though inconspicuous by nature, as a bicyclist and an umbrellist Unwin was severely evident.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“There is no better way to understand your own motives and dispositions than by finding someone to act as your opposite.       T”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“His mind lingered for a time in the hinterlands of sleep, words drifting over the border as though on a warm wind, unfastened from their meanings.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“Monsters always return to the people who made them.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“At home he went about in his socks. That way he could avoid disturbing the neighbors and also indulge in the occasional shoeless swoop across the room, as when one is preparing a breakfast of oatmeal and the oatmeal wants raisins and brown sugar, which are in the cupboard at the other end of the room. To glide with sock-swaddled feet over a world of glossy planes: that would be a wondrous thing! But Unwin’s apartment was smallish at best, and the world is unkind to the shoeless and frolicsome.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“The expert detective’s pursuit will go unnoticed, but not because he is unremarkable. Rather, like the suspect’s shadow, he will appear as though he is meant to be there.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“It is not enough to say that you have had a hunch. Once written down, most such inklings reveal themselves for what they are: something to be tossed into a wishing well, not into a file.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“[On Corpses] Many cases begin with one - this can be disconcerting, but at least you know where you sand. Worse is he corpse that appears partway into your investigation, complicating everything. Best to proceed, therefore, with the vigilance of one who assumes that a corpse is always around the next corner. That way it is less likely to be your own.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“She wasn’t from this city, and maybe not from this country. The thought dizzied him: other, stranger nations in this already too-strange place.”
― Jedediah Berry, A Window or a Small Box

“It was a new thing, or a thing from before that was back again, which was probably more dangerous.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song

“Lest details be mistaken for clues, note that Mr. Charles Unwin, lifetime resident of the city, rode his bicycle to work every day, even when it was raining.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

“You are a puzzle,” Beryl said into the courier’s ear, speaking the word as though it were the finest word they had. And when Beryl said it, the courier thought that maybe it was.”
― Jedediah Berry, The Naming Song