J.M. Ledgard > Quotes

“It is understandable you would want to come back as yourself into a wonderland with the sharpness of color of the Queen of Hearts in a newly opened pack of cards. But coming back as yourself is resurrection. It is uncommon. It may even be greater than the scope of mathematics. We cannot talk with definition about our souls, but it is certain that we will decompose. Some dust of our bodies may end up in a horse, wasp, cockerel, frog, flower, or leaf, but for every one of these sensational assemblies there are a quintillion microorganisms. It is far likelier that the greater part of us will become protists than a skyscraping dormouse. What is likely is that, sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or pools of molten sulphur on which the tonguefish skate. You will be in Hades, the staying place of the spirits of the dead. You will be drowned in oblivion, the River Lethe, swallowing water to erase all memory. It will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in. It will be a submergence. You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms, because they are the foundation of all forms. In your reanimation you will be aware only that you are a fragment of what once was, and are no longer dead. Sometimes this will be an electric feeling, sometimes a sensation of the acid you eat, or the furnace under you. You will burgle and rape other cells in the dark for a seeming eternity, but nothing will come of it. Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity. It is stable. Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness.”
― J. M. Ledgard, Submergence: A Novel

“If man had a sense of proportion, he would die of shame.”
― J.M. Ledgard, Submergence

“But then life is never neat, it is made up of doors and trapdoors. You move down baroque corridors, and even when you think you know which door to open, you still need to have the courage to choose.”
― J. M. Ledgard, Submergence

“It is understandable you would want to come back as yourself into a wonderland with the sharpness of colour of the Queen of Hearts in a newly opened pack of cards. But coming back as yourself is resurrection. It is uncommon.”
― J. M. Ledgard, Submergence: A Novel

“She saw the deepness that was at the edge of France and it made the beach under her feel like a ledge on a cliff.”
― J.M. Ledgard, Submergence

“disordered clumps, wrongly beautiful, like a scan of a damaged brain”
― J.M. Ledgard, Submergence

“Hades is evolved to the highest state of simplicity.”
― J. M. Ledgard, Submergence: A Novel

“There is no comparison between the technology of a submarine going across and the unadorned submersible diving deep. This is because our world is firstly about power and only secondly about knowledge.”
― J.M. Ledgard, Submergence

“To push inward is hard, to descend even more so; it challenges our sense of who we are and where we came from. This is why, even though we are inundated with seawater, the advances of our oceanographic agencies do not match those of our space agencies.”
― J.M. Ledgard, Submergence

“Our souls are made of water, Goethe says. So too, our bodies. There is a flow within us, rising and falling, unidirectional, to the heart. there is a flow without also. We circulate. We are drawn up, and we fall back down to earth again. It's all haemodynamics.”
― J.M. Ledgard, Giraffe

“Six millennia ago, the air god Enlil and the sea god Enki settled themselves in the pantheon of Sumerian deities. The Sumerians believed the world was something like a snow globe. Enlil kept the air in the world together with lil, a mingling atmosphere that also lent luminosity to the sun and stars embellished on the inside of the snow globe. Behind the firmament was a deep sea, and Enki’s house was on the sea floor—a place called Abzu. It was a house made of colors that could not be seen, tiles of lapis lazuli, and encrustations of gems, most especially ruby and cornelian, that could not be crushed at those depths. The bowed cedar doors were hammered right with gold no brine could corrode. In this house Enki created a man. He mixed clay over the volcanic furnace, shaped it with heavy water, and swam it to the world. He breathed air into it there. The man failed. His body was weak. So was his spirit. According to the translation of Samuel Kramer of the University of Pennsylvania, the man was offered a piece of bread: “He does not reach out for it. He can neither sit nor stand nor bend his knees.” What is the lesson? That a man-creature created in the deep should stay there: in a house without light, without a hearth.”
― J. M. Ledgard, Submergence: A Novel

“Until the discovery of hydrothermal vents off the Galápagos Islands in 1977, scientists assumed that life on earth was photosynthetic and belonged to the surface. It was the other way around: photosynthetic life came later, when cells strayed to the top where they were cooked for millions of years before evolving a way to absorb the light, and all the while the chemosynthetic life in the abyss was evolving a stability we cannot hope for.”
― J.M. Ledgard, Submergence

“Do not think to swim below. The ocean is already pushing into ears, sinuses, temples, the softness of eyes, and the harpsichord strings behind the kneecaps.”
― J.M. Ledgard

“People who say no to upgrades will end up in caravan parks and wild places.”
― J. M. Ledgard, Submergence

“If man had a sense of proportion, he would die of shame. His salvation was that he lived in denial.”
― J.M. Ledgard, Submergence

“much”
― J.M. Ledgard, Terra Firma Triptych: When Robots Fly

“jinn . . . occupy bodies which are in a liminal state . . . when consciousness is a sheet of copper beaten down, mirroring only the moment”
― J. M. Ledgard, Submergence: A Novel

“the strangest life exists in the cracks”
― J. M. Ledgard, Submergence: A Novel

“There is never a moment in life when a selfish heart is sattisfied.”
― J.M. Ledgard