Anj > Anj's Quotes

“they stand still as the world eddies about them.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“The theory was that while in a Fallow state you were gathering and conserving strength, nourishing yourself through meditation, sending invisible rootlets out into the universe.”
― Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam

“Not everything about the Wind was bad. Sometimes it blew through the little voids and crevices of the Statues and caused them to sing and whistle in surprising ways; I had never known the Statues to have voices before and it made me laugh for sheer delight.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“Once, men and women were able to turn themselves into eagles and fly immense distances. They communed with rivers and mountains and received wisdom from them. They felt the turning of the stars inside their own minds. My contemporaries did not understand this. They were all enamoured with the idea of progress and believed that whatever was new must be superior to what was old. As if merit was a function of chronology! But it seemed to me that the wisdom of the ancients could not have simply vanished. Nothing simply vanishes. It’s not actually possible.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly. Nowhere is there any disjuncture where I ought to remember something but do not, where I ought to understand something but do not.”
― 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

“Of all the billions of people in this world Raphael is the one I know best and love most. I understand much better now – better than Piranesi ever could – the magnificent thing she did in coming to find me, the magnitude of her courage. I know that she returns to the labyrinth often. Sometimes we go together; sometimes she goes alone. The quiet and the solitude attract her strongly. In them she hopes to find what she needs. It worries me. ‘Don’t disappear,’ I tell her sternly. ‘Do not disappear.’ She makes a rueful, amused face. ‘I won’t,’ she says. ‘We can’t keep rescuing each other,’ I say. ‘It’s ridiculous.’ She smiles. It is a smile with a little sadness in it. But she still wears the perfume – the first thing I ever knew of her – and it still makes me think of Sunlight and Happiness.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“Suddenly I saw in front of me the Statue of the Faun, the Statue that I love above all others. There was his calm, faintly smiling face; there was his forefinger gently pressed to his lips. [...] Hush! he told me. Be comforted!”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“Several times Waves passed over our heads, but they fell back the next instant. We were drenched, we were numbed, we were blinded, we were deafened; but always we were saved.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“the idea that the Ancients had a different way of relating to the world, that they experienced it as something that interacted with them. When they observed the world, the world observed them back.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“Safe in his embrace, I wept for my lost Sanity.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“In all these places I have stood in Doorways and looked ahead.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“Late in the afternoon we returned to the First Vestibule. Just before we parted Raphael said, ‘I love the quiet here. No people!’ She said the last part as if it were the greatest advantage of all. ‘Don’t you like the people in your own Halls?’ I asked, puzzled. ‘I like them,’ she said, with no very great enthusiasm. ‘Mostly I like them. Some of them. I don’t always get them. They don’t always get me.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“This search that you and I are embarked on, it’s a truly great project. Momentous. One of the most important in humanity’s history. The knowledge we seek isn’t something new. It’s old. Really old. Once upon a time people possessed it and they used it to do great things, miraculous things. They should have held on to it. They should have respected it. But they didn’t. They abandoned it for the sake of something they called progress. And it’s up to us to get it back.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“Matthew Rose Sorensen’s mother and father and sisters and friends all ask me where I have been. I tell them what I told Jamie Askill: that I was in a house with many rooms; that the sea sweeps through the house; and that sometimes it swept over me, but always I was saved. Matthew Rose Sorensen’s mother and father and sisters and friends tell each other that this is a description of a mental breakdown seen from the inside; an explanation they find reasonable, perhaps even reassuring. They have Matthew Rose Sorensen back – or so they believe. A man with his face and voice and gestures moves about the world, and that is enough for them. I no longer look like Piranesi. There are no coral beads or fishbones in my hair. My hair is clean and cut and styled. I am clean-shaven. I wear the clothes that were brought to me out of the storage in which Matthew Rose Sorensen’s sisters had placed them. Rose Sorensen had a great number of clothes, all meticulously cared for. He had more than a dozen suits (which I find surprising considering that his income was not large). This love of clothes was something he shared with Piranesi. Piranesi frequently wrote about Dr Ketterley’s clothes in his journal and lamented the contrast with his own ragged garments. This, I suppose, is where I differ from both of them – from Matthew Rose Sorensen and Piranesi; I find I do not care greatly about clothes.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“all I get the sense that she is alone, perhaps by choice or perhaps because no one else was courageous enough to follow her into the darkness.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“I paused and examined Myself for signs of imminent madness or tendencies to self-destruction. Finding none, I read further.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“This is what I call a Distributary World – it was created by ideas flowing out of another world. This world could not have existed unless that other world had existed first.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“At the last moment the albatross swung over my left shoulder. I fell to the Pavement. He flapped his wings in a frantic, panicked sort of way, stuck out his wiry pink legs and tumbled out of the Air into a sort of heap on the Pavement. In the Air he was a miraculous being – a Heavenly Being – but on the Stones of the Pavement he was mortal and subject to the same embarrassments and clumsiness as other mortals.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“Show me the labyrinth.'
'Gladly. What would you like to see?'
'I don't know', she said. 'Whatever you want to show me. Whatever's most beautiful.'
Of course, what I really wanted to show her was everything, but that was impossible.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi