Natasha Pulley > Quotes

“Your science can save a man’s life, but imagination makes it worth living.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Thaniel listened for a while longer, because the silence was so deep and clear that he could hear ghosts of the thirty-six of thirty-seven possible worlds in which Grace had not won at the roulette, and not stepped backward into him. He wished then that he could go back and that the ball had landed on another number. He would be none the wiser and he would be staying at Filigree Street, probably for years, still happy, and he wouldn't have stolen those years from a lonely man who was too decent to mention that they were missing.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said 'do not walk on the grass', one hopped. Anybody who didn't had failed to understand what Oxford was.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Loyalty is a continuous phenomenon, you don't score points for past action,”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Being solitary isn't a disease that needs a cure.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“You're my family! You were family before any of them. I've missed you even when I didn't remember you. Everything I've done since losing you has been about getting back to you. And I know I've left you behind before for other families, but not this time. I can't do it again.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Kingdoms

“I don't tolerate you. I can't breathe when you're not here, I can't think, I can't write music properly, I spend my whole bloody life waiting for the post.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

“Come home, if you remember.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Kingdoms

“What's gone before you, and what will come after,' I said instead.
'Beg pardon?'
'The past ahead. Time is like a river and you float with the current. Your ancestors set off before you did, so they're far ahead. Your descendants will sail it after.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Bedlam Stacks

“The clockwork octopus came out. It extended a tentacle with a clicking of metal joints. Around it was looped the chain of his watch. He hesitated, but took it. The chain skittered over the metal tentacle with a high, thin pitch like incoming sea. It was quite a coincidence for a mechanical sea creature and he was speculating whether it could possibly have been done on purpose when Katsu stole his other sock and flopped on to the floor with an unbiological bang, whereupon it octopused out of the open door and slid down the banister. He exclaimed at it, was ignored, and then went after it just in time to see it disappear into the parlour. It was climbing up the leg of the piano stool when he caught up. The watchmaker confiscated the sock and threw it over his shoulder to Thaniel, who caught it with the tips of his fingers. The octopus settled in his lap. ‘Thank you for finding him,’ he said. Against the piano keys, his hands were too warmly coloured for the watery morning. ‘I was looking for him earlier. He plays hide and seek.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“It is not summer, England doesn't have summer, it has continuous autumn with a fortnight's variation here and there.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“I think you're the same thing in three different lights.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Kingdoms

“Science had to have some mystery otherwise everyone would find out how simple it was.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“But Spanish and English aren't different languages, only extreme dialects of Latin. It's almost possible to translate word for word. Translation from a language unrelated to English is nothing to do with equivalent words. Whenever I'd tried to do that in Chinese I'd come out with unbroken nonsense. I had to forget the English, hang the meaning up in a well-lit gallery, stare at it hard, then describe it afresh.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Bedlam Stacks

“. . . More octo . . .pi?' Thaniel said, knowing that it sounded wrong, though so did puses and podes. He tried to think where he had heard it last , but he did not often have business with more than one octopus at a time.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Englishmen were rained on too often to come up with anything that imaginative.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“I'm a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don't.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“The Ancient Greeks? If they had steam engines, why didn't they have trains?'
. . .
'They were philosophers; they put two and two together and got a goldfish.'
(p. 76)”
― Natasha Pulley

“Why do you hate Indians? You know white people are are much worse, don't you? It isn't as though there's some kind of international bar you're not reaching out here. We're terrible at everything. Lasting much past forty-five. Learning more than one language. It's a miracle, actually; sickly prematurely aging worryingly inbred horsey idiots have managed to convince everyone else their way is best by no other means than firmness of manner and the tactical distribution of flags. I can't believe no one's called our bluff yet.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Bedlam Stacks

“People shouldn't be throwing away their history when it's still doing archery practice forty miles up the road.”
― Natasha Pulley

“The truth was that he loved Mori so hopelessly he could have found a way to excuse cemeteries of dead wives.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

“Think of horse races. People like to bet on the one with three legs and a wheeze.They don't bet on that one because they think it will win, but because they can see how very glorious it would be if it were to win”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Joe smiled his charming smile, which was less broad than his real one. Kite was so immune that Joe had forgotten how well it worked on everyone else. He wondered if anybody had ever been brave enough to flirt with Kite, and which ditch they’d ended up in.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Kingdoms

“It was embarrassing to be associated with a man who thought Newton was a town.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Chivalry—Kuroda, you know when women put vegetables on a spoon and zoom it round so their kids think it's a magic butterfly or something? Chivalry is just what your mum called being a decent human being so you'd feel like a really good boy when you were nice to people. Don't say it to grown-ups.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

“good number of people listened to, and wrote, music because they liked to hear the sound of mathematics.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“When a sign says don’t walk on the grass, one hops.’ He”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“His entire soul cramped. His heart locked and he couldn't breathe, never mind move, and everything in him was shrieking as if he'd thrust his hand into a fire. The second he stopped trying to leave, it eased.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Kingdoms

“They were philosophers; they put two and two together and got a goldfish.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“He laughed. It showed how he had been when he was younger. Mild-mannered and handsome. In a shilling-spin of an instant I realised that he wasn’t crude work but the ruin of something fine. The same as everything else here. I felt ashamed for not having noticed before. There was a knack to seeing how things had used to be but I’d never had it; I was no archaeologist. The new understanding lit up the edges of my mind and like always they were closer and more worn than I would have liked or thought.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Bedlam Stacks