M. Gem > M.'s Quotes

“Hours need other hours to make any sense at all.”
― David Mitchell, Number9Dream

“It's just that our memories are rarely where we think they are.”
― Rabih Alameddine

“I'm not trying to be rude," he said, so effortlessly rude that he didn't have to try.”
― Kevin Wilson, Perfect Little World

“If meaning lies even partially in usage, then you subtly alter the language every time you use it. You couldn't leave it intact if you tried.”
― Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

“You'll always find what you bring with you.”
― Jay Hosking, Three Years with the Rat

“Art feasts upon its maker”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“Memories are their own descendents masquerading as the ancestors of the present.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“Our brains are dark globes lit by very distant stars.”
― David Mitchell, McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

“Depression turns outdoors indoors.”
― David Mitchell

“& only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!
Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I have observed that the opportunities to chew on failure are as myriad as fork designs. In each there is a little death, and the first response to such a death is usually anger.”
― Heather Rose, The Museum of Modern Love

“If we could read the script of the future, we'd never turn the page.”
― David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue

“I is an Empire of I's.”
― David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue

“Reality erases itself as it rerecords itself.”
― David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue

“I thought of the three of us—myself, Trumilcik, and Elaine—each present there via our more or less phantasmagorical versions of each other, our recondite emblems of ourselves. And for a moment I felt I was at the point of grasping what it was that made the full unfolding of another human being into one’s consciousness so painfully dazzling that one spent one’s life contriving ways of filtering them, blocking them out, setting up labyrinthine passageways between oneself and them, kidnapping their images for various exploitative purposes of one’s own, and generally doing all one could to fend off their problematic, objective reality. The phone rang.”
― James Lasdun, The Horned Man: A Novel

“She was what all the dead are: whatever the living make them.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“The dead's stories are lifted away from them; they are sentenced to an eternity as deus ex machina in the stories of others.”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“So what is gratitude, really, but reverence for a system that gives and deprives at random? No, not at random. The non-randomness is exactly the point, right?”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X

“the arctic dark, a lit-up ark”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

“Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.”
― Kait Rokowski