Andrew Taylor > Quotes

“Time doesn't heal, it just gives you other things to think about.”
― Andrew Taylor, The Office of the Dead

“Books are not luxuries. They are the meat and drink for the mind.”
― Andrew Taylor, The Anatomy of Ghosts

“That's what hell means, perhaps, being compelled not just to live but to relive.”
― Andrew Taylor, Bleeding Heart Square

“The grief of children was unconditional, fueled by the implicit belief that it would last forever; for a child, grief was not grief unless it was eternal.”
― Andrew Taylor, The Four Last Things

“We distract ourselves with details. It's a way of coping.”
― Andrew Taylor, The Office of the Dead

“One grey cloak is much like another, just as all cats are grey in the dark.”
― Andrew Taylor, The Ashes of London

“We put the labels we choose on things [...], and for our own purposes. That is the long and the short of it.”
― Andrew Taylor, The Anatomy of Ghosts

“Firmitas, utilitas, venustas, she thought. Buildings should be like the nests of birds and bees.”
― Andrew Taylor, The Ashes of London

“Maybe our life is an affair of coastlines,
of touching on contours, of sand shifting
underfoot, of footprints straying
a shoreline. No epitaph in granite,
no marble eminence, no limestone
subtlety. Tracking my prints back
is recovering tides’ clean sweep,
the cleansing services of storms’ and winds’
abrasive erasures. The only line
that matters in the end is forward
since home is what we find when we find
what it is, they say. Still, standing on the edge
of stone seven thousand kilometres wide,
my back to a whole past vivid to my eyes,
I wonder why, here, it should suddenly begin.”
― Andrew Taylor

“power exercises over the civilian population.”
― Andrew Taylor, The Scent of Death

“Why do we think only the dead haunt us, for the living are just as good at it?”
― Andrew Taylor

“THE OFFICIAL NAME of the road was Portugal Street, in honour of our Queen, Catherine of Braganza, but everyone persisted in calling it Piccadilly. It was an old route west to Hyde Park and then towards Reading. Long ago, some of the land nearby had been owned by a man who had grown rich in the manufacture of those large old collars of cutwork lace named piccadills, and somehow the name had been transferred to the road.”
― Andrew Taylor, The King's Evil

“etiolated”
― Andrew Taylor, Death's Own Door