Adam > Adam's Quotes

“[B]e comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.”
― Paul Harding

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I woke sometime in the middle of the night and lay in the hammock, wriggled my foot out of the sleeping bag into the chill and found the rough ground with my bare foot and rocked myself back and forth. And watched the stars swim against the mesh of leaves. Like a fish nosing a net.

This is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Everything is made to perish; the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so. No, he thought. The wonder of anything is that it was made in the first place. What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?”
― Paul Harding

“Conduct your life in such a way that, when your train breaks down in the eve of your years, you have a warm, dry car driven by a loved one - or a hired one, it matters not - to take you home.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Whoever opined "Money can't buy you happiness" obviously had far too much of the stuff.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Fantasy. Lunacy.
All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Time is the speed at which the past decays.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Snow is bruised lilac in half light: such pure solace.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Well, Hae-Joo probed, what did I do to relax?
I play Go against my sony, I said.
"To relax?" he responded, incredulous. "Who wins, you or the sony?"
The sony, I answered, or how would I ever improve?
So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?
I said, If losers can xploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I said something about reading not being knowledge, about knowledge without experience being food without sustenance.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Yay, Old Uns' Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an' made miracles ord'nary, but it din't master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o' humans, yay, a hunger for more.
More what? I asked. Old Uns'd got ev'rythin'.
Oh, more gear, more food, faster speeds, longer lifes, easier lifes, more power, yay. Now the Hole World is big, but it weren't big 'nuff for that hunger what made Old Uns rip out the skies an' boil up the seas an' poison soil with crazed atoms an' donkey 'bout with rotted seeds so new plagues was borned an' babbits was freak-birthed. Fin'ly, bit'ly, then quicksharp, states busted into bar'bric tribes an' the Civ'lize Days ended, 'cept for a few folds'n'pockets here'n'there, where its last embers glimmer.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I watched clouds awobbly from the floor ' that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o'clouds.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“The glances musicians exchange, when music is effortless, that was what he wanted from Milly, that intimacy.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“... in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights", the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“We - by whom I mean anyone over sixty - commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“We had run out of infinity.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Because a man like me has no business with this substance "beauty," yet here she is, in these soundproofed chambers of my heart.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core. Rome'll decline and fall again, Cortes'll lay Tenochtitlan to waste again, and later...the sun'll grow cold again. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don't know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tentative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience: This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightly. Those times that can fly.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“She also confessed that in an odd way she was happier here than she'd ever been. Even with all the loss. Happier being whatever that was. Than waiting.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“Ha. Admit it: you don't have the slightest idea what you are doing, you never ever did. With all the nets in the world, real or unreal. You swam around in a flashing confused school following the tail of the fish in front. Pretty much. Nibbling at whatever passed, in whatever current you swam into.

Even the love of your life felt like luck, like she might vanish in the finning crowd at any moment. Which she did.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values