Steven Hall > Quotes

“Every single cell in the human body replaces itself over a period of seven years. That means there's not even the smallest part of you now that was part of you seven years ago.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“I looked at her and a voice inside me said, we only see starlight because all the stars are bleeding.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“It's a stark thought that when we die most of us will leave behind uneaten biscuits, unused coffee, half toilet rolls, half cartons of milk in the fridge to go sour; that everyday functional things will outlive us and prove that we weren't ready to go; that we weren't smart or knowing or heroic; that we were just animals whose animal bodies stopped working without any sort of schedule or any consent from us.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“It's like they say about soldiers coming back from war. People all around you are dying. Really dying, Eric. You go in for a week's chemotherapy and you're in a ward with people who are really, actually dying, there and then and doing their best to come to terms with it. When the week's up, you go home and you see your family and your friends and everything's normal and familiar. It's too much. You think - one world can't possibly hold both these lives and you feel like you're going to go crazy when you realise the world is that big and it can fill with the most terrible things whenever it wants to.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“Its hurtful and wonderful how our jokes survive us.
Since I left home on this journey, I've thought a lot about this-how a big part of any life is about the hows and whys of setting up machinery. it's building systems, devices, motors. Winding up the clockwork of direct debits, configuring newspaper deliveries and anniversaries and photographs and credit card repayments and anecdotes. Starting their engines, setting them in motion and sending them chugging off into the future to do their thing at a regular or irregular intervals. When a person leaves or dies or ends, they leave an afterimage; their outline in the devices they've set up around them. The image fades to the winding down of springs, the slow running out of fuel as the machines of a life lived in certain ways in certain places and from certain angles are shut down or seize up or blink off one by one. It takes time. Sometimes, you come across the dusty lights or electrical hum of someone else's machine, maybe a long time after you ever expected to, still running, lonely in the dark. Still doing its thing for the person who started it up long, long after they've gone.
A man lives so many different lengths of time.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“A man lives so many different lengths of time. And each one has its own end.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“Already the dream was coming apart, its bright silk strands unwinding into nebulous emotions, little coloured clouds of feeling being dispersed by the movement of my waking-up mind. This is how it's always been with Light Bulb Fragment dreams; by the time I'm fully awake, they're gone.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“A cat is a responsibility after all. And feeding and keeping and caring about a stupid fat cat isn't much, isn't much in the entirety of what counts for being a person and the huge range of what people do,but it is something. It is something and it's something that's warm and that I still have.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“We had to keep explaining things, backtracking and filling gaps. We realised our own conversations had evolved into a kind of shorthand, a tidy, neat little minimalism. Covering the whole canvas in broad obvious brushstrokes for outsiders felt like a waste of sounds, time and effort. Speaking with footnotes.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“There are two types of people in the world. There are the people who understand instinctively that the story of The Flood and the story of The Tower of Babel are the same thing, and those who don't.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“Geniuses don’t go mad,” he said. “That’s what people don’t understand. They get out so far out that the water is like glass and they can see for miles and see so much, and in ways people have never seen before.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“We’re all going forwards and we’re never coming back.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“If you want your boomerang to come back, first you've got to throw it.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“Imagine you're in a rowing boat on a lake.
It's summer, early morning. That time when the sun hasn't quite broken free of the landscape and long, projected shadows tigerstripe the light. The rays are warm on your skin as you drift through them, but in the shadows the air is still cold, greyness holding onto undersides and edges wherever it can.
A low clinging breeze comes and goes, racing ripples across the water and gently rocking you and your boat as you float in yin-yang slices of morning. Birds are singing. It's a sharp, clear sound, clean without the humming backing track of a day well underway. There's the occasional sound of wind in leaves and the occasional slap-splash of a larger wavelet breaking on the side of your boat, but nothing else.
You reach over the side and feel the shock of the water, the steady bob of the lake's movement playing up and down your knuckles in a rhythm of cold. You pull your arm back; you enjoy the after-ache in your fingers. Holding out your hand, you close your eyes and feel the tiny physics of gravity and resistance as the liquid finds routes across your skin, builds itself into droplets of the required weight, then falls, each drop ending with an audible tap.
Now, right on that tap - stop. Stop imagining. Here's the real game. Here's
what's obvious and wonderful and terrible all at the same time: the lake in my head, the lake I was imagining, has just become the lake in your head. It doesn't matter if you never know me, or never know anything about me. I could be dead, I could have been dead a hundred years before you were even born and still - think about this carefully, think past the obvious sense of it to the huge and amazing miracle hiding inside - the lake in my head has become the lake in your head.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“They say life is tenacious. They say given half a chance, or less, life will grow and exist and evolve anywhere, even in the most inhospitable and unlikely of places.
Life will always find a way, they say.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“There's nothing about the times when she wasn't funny or sexy, or when she talked too much or about her pissing or shitting. There's no way to really preserve a person when they're gone and that's because whatever you write down it's not the truth, it's just a story.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“Everything that had happened was all part of the same great big something, it had to happen, I just knew”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“There is no stillness, only change. Yesterday’s here is not today’s here. Yesterday’s here is somewhere in Russia, in a wilderness in Canada, a deep blue nowhere out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s behind the sun, it’s in deep space, hundreds of thousands, millions of miles left behind. We can never wake up in the same place we went to sleep in. Our place in the universe, the universe itself, it all changes faster and faster by the second. Every one of us standing on this planet, we’re all moving forwards and we’re never ever coming back. The truth is, stillness is an idea, a dream. It’s the thought of the friendly, welcoming lights still shining in all the places we’ve been forced to abandon.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“A movement unlocked my attention. I re-focused my eyes, looking past the vodka glass and into the static buzz of the TV. I stayed very still for a few seconds before lowering the glass to the floor, careful not to take my eyes off the screen. There was something distant and alive in the depths of the white noise - a living glide of thoughts swimming forward, a moving body of concepts and half felt images.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“It's tiring not knowing people isn't it?" Clio said later.

It isn't word efficient," I agreed.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“Almost sixteen weeks after I'd woken up on the bedroom floor, the lightbulb box arrived.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“In the dark places of yourself, thinking machines you never get near enough to see are constantly building things and running their own secretive programmes all of their own. Maybe you get a snippet of what's going on back there, like this fragment of a song drifting its way into the light, or a phrase, or an image, or maybe just a mood, a wash of content of a bleak draining of colour that floods your chest and your stomach more than it ever finds its way into the bight halogen chrome of your mind.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“Just tell me i'm not dreaming?"
maybe you are," she said. "Probably you are."
I don't want to be. Clio, i can't do this on my own."
There was a bang.
We both jumped, turned towards the Roman bath. A clump of leaves swirled on the surface of the water in a slow spiral.
Is there something down there?"
Clio nodded. "Yes."
What is it?"
I don't k now," she said, watching the waters. "Something from down where it gets black."
There was another bang.
Little waves raced across the littery surface, lapping the bath's mouldy tiled sides.
Are you ready? This is it." Clio held me by the tops of my arms and gave me a smile which was meant to be strong and almost was.
What? Clee, what's going on?"
Bang.”
― Steven Hall

“Timelessness again, the house like a secret temple as dust built up on things that were never meant to have dust on them - Clee's toothbrush and hairdryer and left-out-of-the-box CDs and deodorant on the bathroom window ledge. Ordinary things carefully kept in place because the last person to touch them would never put a cup down on the edge of the table again, or ever leave a book half-read.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“How could I sit here and ask this stranger to help me pick up the facts of my life? The shopping bags had burst and all my things were rolling out over a packed pavement with me scurrying after them, stooping and bumping and tripping: Excuse me, I'm sorry. Could you just...Excuse me.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“I’m going to have a smiley face tattooed on the underneath of my big toe.” I said why and Clio said, “So when I’m dead and they put a toe tag on me it’ll look funny in the morgue.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“It's a sad fact that most people can't even spot a story when they see one. Most people don't know that stories aren't confined by the covers of books or by half-hour slots on TV. The world is made of stories. The world is driven by stories. When a sunburned-friend tells you about their holiday, it's not a straight list of everything that happened to them - it's a story, an anecdote with a plot, a beginning, a middle and an end. Each one of their holiday snaps is a story too. When you're making a decision, and you imagine the possible outcomes - what are you doing if not telling yourself a story? History is a story. Society is a story. Countries are stories. Your plans are stories. Your desires are stories. Your own memories are stories - narratives selected, trimmed and packaged by the hidden machinery in your mind. Human beings are story engines. We have to be - to understand stories is to understand the world.”
― Steven Hall, The Unwritten, Vol. 3: Dead Man's Knock

“try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves.”
― steven hall, The Raw Shark Texts

“Ouch,' she mumbles. 'Somebody's superglued my joints.”
― Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts