Michael > Michael's Quotes

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I've read that madness is present when everything you see and hear takes on an equal significance. A dead bird makes you cry, and so does a doorknob.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching

“Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“I felt a surge of anger and for a moment I thought I would not tell him what I knew. But then I thought that it was unkind to punish him for something he cannot help. It is not his fault that he does not see things the way I do.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“People call me a philosopher or a scientist or an anthropologist. I am none of those things. I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten. I divine what has disappeared utterly. I work with absences, with silences, with curious gaps between things. I am really more of a magician than anything else.’ Laurence Arne-Sayles, interview in The Secret Garden, May 1976”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“I find myself thinking of the imperceptible beat in which a word exists, between the articulation and the hearing.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“The past never ends. Or, worse, the past tells us how it ends. Over, it says, over and over again.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

“The scratch of nib to paper, the liquid birth and loop of the letters, each connected to the next, word following word, and all the small spaces that exist between them.”
― Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat