Alyssa Hancock > Alyssa's Quotes

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

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

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

“Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

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

“People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

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

“Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“It's a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Anticipating the end of the world is humanity's oldest pastime”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“- This isn't an interrogation or a trail. Your version of the truth is the only thing that matters.

-Truth is singular. It's 'versions' are mistruths.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“...now I'm a spent firework; but at least I've been a firework.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I...asked why purebloods despised me so. He replied, 'What if the difference between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?... fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head. No Jacob's ladder this, no, but rather Civilization's Ladder, if you will.”
― David Mitchell , Cloud Atlas

“By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“...A mountain you're plannin' on climbin' ain't the same as the one you ain't. It ain't so pretty...”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgement that something is more important than fear; The brave may not live forever but the cautious do not live at all.”
― Meg Cabot, The Princess Diaries

“And so taking the long way home through the market I slow my pace down. It doesn't come naturally. My legs are programmed to trot briskly and my arms to pump up and down like pistons, but I force myself to stroll past the stalls and pavement cafes. To enjoy just being somewhere, rather than rushing from somewhere, to somewhere. Inhaling deep lungfuls of air, instead of my usual shallow breaths. I take a moment to just stop and look around me. And smile to myself.
For the first time in a long time, I can, quite literally, smell the coffee.”
― Alexandra Potter, The Two Lives of Miss Charlotte Merryweather