Quotes
“Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands.” (12)
“Pain is strong, aye - but friends’ eyes, more strong.” (29)
“Days, I yarned tales of Maui to birds and birds yarned sea tales to I.” (32)
“Afraid of ‘em? No, I’m afraid of being one.” (44)
“If one will just be still, shut up, and listen - lo, behold, the world’ll sift through one’s ideas for one, esp. in a grimy London railway station.” (45)
“Glossy black waters invited me to jump. Ignored ‘em.” (46)
“Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction.” (49)
“A half read book is a half-finished love affair.” (64)
“One’s own sweat is one’s best reward!” “74)
“Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, hast the craftiest doorman.“ (75)
“A man is ruined when the times change but he does not.” (76)
“One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.” (82)
“Don’t remember the summer even saying good-bye.” (86)
“The flat world is curved in the boy’s eye.” (97)
“Acting like an insider can be enough to be one.” (105)
“Life. A Force Ten shitstorm.” (108)
“Blame its user, blame its maker, but don’t blame the gun.” (112)
“They pass over, but they ain’t gone.” (115)
“Promises you can’t keep are not a sound currency.” (118)
“The media… is where democracies conduct their civil wars.” (124)
“The room bubbles with sentences more spoken than listened to.” (129)
“Do whatever you can’t not do.” (133)
“Men invented money. Women invented mutual aid.” (137)
“It’s a wise soul who can distinguish traps from opportunities.” (137)
“The dumbest dog can sit and watch. What takes brains is knowing when to look away.” (141)
“Pain erased everything but pain.” (145)
“Time’s Arrow became Time’s Boomerang.” (147)
“The pieces fell into place. I fell into pieces.” (153)
“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.” (166)
“Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led.” (169)
“Clocks in disagreement are worse than no clock at all.” (171)
“Was this some sort of a kinky S & M hotel?” (174)
“The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.” (178)
“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.” (180)
“My dinner outstared me.” (181)
“Your version of the truth is the only one that matters…. Truth is singular. Its “versions” are mistruths.” (185)
“Because you cannot discern our differences, you believe we have none.” (187)
“Corpocracy is built on slavery.” (189)
“Perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility.” (193)
“If my xperiences do not give me the right to be sure, whose do?” (194)
“Sonmi-451, you must create Catechisms of your own.” (207)
“We are only what we know, and I wished to be much more than I was, sorely.” (208)
“Fury forges will.” (210)
“Descents are more hazardous than ascents.” (217)
“I should remember that most of science’s holy grails are discovered by accident, in unexpected places.” (220)
“What was knowledge for, I would ask myself, if I could not use it to better my xistence?” (224)
“Knowledge without xperience being food without sustenance.” (224)
“One’s environment is key to one’s identity.” (229)
“Oy, list’n! Times are you’re weak ‘gainst the world! Times are you can’t do nothin’! That ain’t your fault, it’s the busted world’s fault is all! But no matter how loud I shout, Boy Zachary, he don’t hear me nor never will.” (242)
“Civ’lize needs time, an’ if we let this clock die, time’ll die too, an’ then how can we bring back the Civ’lize Days as it was b’fore the Fall?” (247)
“Women, oh, women! They’ll find the baddest meanin’ in our words an’ hold it up sayin’, Look what you attacked me with!” (256)
“Smart’n’Civ’lize ain’t nothin’ to do with the color o’ the skin, nay.” (258)
“Oh, bein’ young ain’t easy ‘cos ev’rythin’ you’re puzzlin’n’anxin’ you’re puzzlin’n’anxin’ for the first time.” (265)
“That human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too.” (273)
“We old Uns was sick with Smart an’ the Fall was our cure.” (279)
“Fool o’ fate what I am, yay, what we all are.” (285)
“Pretty lies was better’n scabbin’ true.” (287)
“In our busted world the right thing ain’t always possible.” (301)
“Secrets jus’ rot you like teeth if you don’t yank ‘em out.” (302)
“Souls cross the skies o’ time Abbess’d say, like clouds crossin’ skies o’ the world.” (302)
“His will is his slave, an’ if his will say-soes, “Don’t!” he won’t, nay.” (302)
“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.” (308)
“Most yarnin’s got a bit o’ true, some yarnin’s got some true, an a few yarnin’s got a lot o’ true.” (309)
“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” (320)
“A Soul’s value is the dollars therein.” (325)
“All rising suns set, Archivist. Our corpocracy now smells of senility.” (326)
“An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.” (327)
“Every nowhere is somewhere.” (329)
“Their entertainment was themselves; consumers cannot xist without 3-D and AdV, but humans once did and still can.” (330)
“But no crisis is insuperable if people cooperate.” (330)
“Nothing is more heinous than the enslavement of your tribe.” (333)
“Sunlite bent around the world, lending fragile color to wildflowers.” (333)
“All the woe of the words “I am” seemed to dissolve there, painlessly, peacefully.” (339)
“I envied their certainty about the future.” (342)
“They were doomed from their wombtanks.” (343)
“Every consumer, xec, and Juche Boardman in Neo So Corpos must understand that fabricants are purebloods, be they grown in a wombtank or in a womb.” 346)
“My Declarations were germinated when Yoona~939 was xecuted, nurtured by Boom-Sook and Fang, strengthened by the tutelage of Mephi and the Abbess birthed in Papa Song’s slaughtership.” (347)
“We see a game beyond the endgame.” (349)
“No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.” (349)
“Sleep, sleep, sleep, come free me.” (353)
“’Freedom!’ is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.” (356)
“To the starving man, potato peelings are haute cuisine.” (358)
“Oh, once you’ve been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn’t want you back.” (360)
“Sulkers binge on lonely fantasies.” (369)
“Poor England. Too much history for its acreage.” (370)
“Christmas is a wonderful time for bridging the spaces between us.”(371)
“I thought about Christmases gone, so many more gone than lay ahead.” (371)
“What I wouldn’t give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.” (373)
“The end of the beginning.” (376)
“The intervening years did not fall away as I had hoped.” (378)
“When your parents die, they move in with you.” (381)
“The Range Rover wolfed down the northward miles.” (382)
“It is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul.” (387)
“I shall beaver away in exile, far from the city that knitted my bones.” (387)
“The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming … in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening.” (392)
“Whoever said money can’t buy you happiness obviously didn’t have enough of the stuff.” (394)
“Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.” (396)
“I lied, yes, but that doesn’t make me a liar. Lying’s wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.” (400)
“What happens in a minute’s time is made by what you do.” (401)
“Oaks live for six hundred years. Two hundred to grow, two hundred to live, two hundred to die.” (402)
“All I want out of life is life.” (413)
“It’s a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.” (418)
“Truth doesn’t care who discovers it, so why should you?” (421)
“Yo! Amaba! A! Ese! Jodido! Perro!” (427)
“Luisa is distracted by a strange gravity that makes her pause for a moment and look at its rigging, listen to its wooden bones creaking. She grasps for the ends of this elastic moment, but they disappear into the past and future.” (430)
“My problems are mine, and yours are yours, and this one is yours.” (441)
“We cut a pack of cards called historical context - our generation, Sixsmith, cut tens, jacks, and queens. Adrian’s cut threes, fours, and fives. That’s all.” (442)
“We had run out of infinity.” (442)
“Wars do not combust without warning.” (444)
“Science devises even bloodier means of war until humanity's power of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilization drives itself into extinction.” (444)
“In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky?” (445)
“Wars are never cured, they just go into remission for a few years.” (453)
“Because a man like me has no business with this substance “beauty,” yet here she is, in these soundproofed chambers of my heart.” (454)
“But place its mouth against your ear and you hear the world in a different way.” (458)
“All boundaries are conventions, national ones too. One may transcend any convention, if only one can first conceive of doing so.” (460)
“The healthy can’t understand the emptied, the broken.” (469)
“The very same. Fancy that. Around we go.” (469)
“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, Cortés'll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian'll be blown to pieces again, you and I'll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I'll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you'll read this letter again, the sun'll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.” (482)
“Aye, look like Eden it might, but Raiatea is a fallen place, same as everywhere, aye, no snakes, but the Devil plies his trade here as much as anywhere else.” (483)
“It’s all rats’ nests & rubble now. That’s what all beliefs turn to one day. Rats’ nests & rubble.” (486)
“The weak are the meat the strong do eat.” (489)
“This rapacity, yes, powers out Progress; for ends infernal or divine I know not.” (489)
“Had I but known! I could have helped the child jump ship, deflect his destiny as the Channings did mine, or help him understand that no state of tyranny reigns forever.” (500)
“Jackson, when you are a grown man do not permit your profession to sunder you from loved ones.” (501)
“Maoris prey on Moriori, Whites prey on darker-hued cousins, fleas prey on mice, cats prey on rats, Christians on infidels, first mates on cabin boys, Death on the Living. ‘The weak are the meat the strong do eat.’” (503)
“‘Tis hey, ho! for the open road.” (504)
“Autua’s heart beat against my side, encouraging my own.” (505)
“A distinct hill rose up & its name stirred in memory’s sediment: - Diamond Head.” (506)
“In Honolulu’s lawless hive, where vessels of all flags & nations arrive & depart daily, a man may change his name & history between entree & dessert.” (506)
“My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles though an unhurried eternity. My thoughts flow thus. Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrast, however. To wit: history admits no rules: only outcomes.” (507)
“A purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost.” (508)
“It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.” (508)
“A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth living.” (508)
“‘Your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!’ Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?” (509)
“Pain is strong, aye - but friends’ eyes, more strong.” (29)
“Days, I yarned tales of Maui to birds and birds yarned sea tales to I.” (32)
“Afraid of ‘em? No, I’m afraid of being one.” (44)
“If one will just be still, shut up, and listen - lo, behold, the world’ll sift through one’s ideas for one, esp. in a grimy London railway station.” (45)
“Glossy black waters invited me to jump. Ignored ‘em.” (46)
“Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction.” (49)
“A half read book is a half-finished love affair.” (64)
“One’s own sweat is one’s best reward!” “74)
“Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, hast the craftiest doorman.“ (75)
“A man is ruined when the times change but he does not.” (76)
“One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.” (82)
“Don’t remember the summer even saying good-bye.” (86)
“The flat world is curved in the boy’s eye.” (97)
“Acting like an insider can be enough to be one.” (105)
“Life. A Force Ten shitstorm.” (108)
“Blame its user, blame its maker, but don’t blame the gun.” (112)
“They pass over, but they ain’t gone.” (115)
“Promises you can’t keep are not a sound currency.” (118)
“The media… is where democracies conduct their civil wars.” (124)
“The room bubbles with sentences more spoken than listened to.” (129)
“Do whatever you can’t not do.” (133)
“Men invented money. Women invented mutual aid.” (137)
“It’s a wise soul who can distinguish traps from opportunities.” (137)
“The dumbest dog can sit and watch. What takes brains is knowing when to look away.” (141)
“Pain erased everything but pain.” (145)
“Time’s Arrow became Time’s Boomerang.” (147)
“The pieces fell into place. I fell into pieces.” (153)
“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.” (166)
“Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led.” (169)
“Clocks in disagreement are worse than no clock at all.” (171)
“Was this some sort of a kinky S & M hotel?” (174)
“The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.” (178)
“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.” (180)
“My dinner outstared me.” (181)
“Your version of the truth is the only one that matters…. Truth is singular. Its “versions” are mistruths.” (185)
“Because you cannot discern our differences, you believe we have none.” (187)
“Corpocracy is built on slavery.” (189)
“Perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility.” (193)
“If my xperiences do not give me the right to be sure, whose do?” (194)
“Sonmi-451, you must create Catechisms of your own.” (207)
“We are only what we know, and I wished to be much more than I was, sorely.” (208)
“Fury forges will.” (210)
“Descents are more hazardous than ascents.” (217)
“I should remember that most of science’s holy grails are discovered by accident, in unexpected places.” (220)
“What was knowledge for, I would ask myself, if I could not use it to better my xistence?” (224)
“Knowledge without xperience being food without sustenance.” (224)
“One’s environment is key to one’s identity.” (229)
“Oy, list’n! Times are you’re weak ‘gainst the world! Times are you can’t do nothin’! That ain’t your fault, it’s the busted world’s fault is all! But no matter how loud I shout, Boy Zachary, he don’t hear me nor never will.” (242)
“Civ’lize needs time, an’ if we let this clock die, time’ll die too, an’ then how can we bring back the Civ’lize Days as it was b’fore the Fall?” (247)
“Women, oh, women! They’ll find the baddest meanin’ in our words an’ hold it up sayin’, Look what you attacked me with!” (256)
“Smart’n’Civ’lize ain’t nothin’ to do with the color o’ the skin, nay.” (258)
“Oh, bein’ young ain’t easy ‘cos ev’rythin’ you’re puzzlin’n’anxin’ you’re puzzlin’n’anxin’ for the first time.” (265)
“That human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too.” (273)
“We old Uns was sick with Smart an’ the Fall was our cure.” (279)
“Fool o’ fate what I am, yay, what we all are.” (285)
“Pretty lies was better’n scabbin’ true.” (287)
“In our busted world the right thing ain’t always possible.” (301)
“Secrets jus’ rot you like teeth if you don’t yank ‘em out.” (302)
“Souls cross the skies o’ time Abbess’d say, like clouds crossin’ skies o’ the world.” (302)
“His will is his slave, an’ if his will say-soes, “Don’t!” he won’t, nay.” (302)
“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.” (308)
“Most yarnin’s got a bit o’ true, some yarnin’s got some true, an a few yarnin’s got a lot o’ true.” (309)
“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” (320)
“A Soul’s value is the dollars therein.” (325)
“All rising suns set, Archivist. Our corpocracy now smells of senility.” (326)
“An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.” (327)
“Every nowhere is somewhere.” (329)
“Their entertainment was themselves; consumers cannot xist without 3-D and AdV, but humans once did and still can.” (330)
“But no crisis is insuperable if people cooperate.” (330)
“Nothing is more heinous than the enslavement of your tribe.” (333)
“Sunlite bent around the world, lending fragile color to wildflowers.” (333)
“All the woe of the words “I am” seemed to dissolve there, painlessly, peacefully.” (339)
“I envied their certainty about the future.” (342)
“They were doomed from their wombtanks.” (343)
“Every consumer, xec, and Juche Boardman in Neo So Corpos must understand that fabricants are purebloods, be they grown in a wombtank or in a womb.” 346)
“My Declarations were germinated when Yoona~939 was xecuted, nurtured by Boom-Sook and Fang, strengthened by the tutelage of Mephi and the Abbess birthed in Papa Song’s slaughtership.” (347)
“We see a game beyond the endgame.” (349)
“No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.” (349)
“Sleep, sleep, sleep, come free me.” (353)
“’Freedom!’ is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.” (356)
“To the starving man, potato peelings are haute cuisine.” (358)
“Oh, once you’ve been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn’t want you back.” (360)
“Sulkers binge on lonely fantasies.” (369)
“Poor England. Too much history for its acreage.” (370)
“Christmas is a wonderful time for bridging the spaces between us.”(371)
“I thought about Christmases gone, so many more gone than lay ahead.” (371)
“What I wouldn’t give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.” (373)
“The end of the beginning.” (376)
“The intervening years did not fall away as I had hoped.” (378)
“When your parents die, they move in with you.” (381)
“The Range Rover wolfed down the northward miles.” (382)
“It is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul.” (387)
“I shall beaver away in exile, far from the city that knitted my bones.” (387)
“The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming … in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening.” (392)
“Whoever said money can’t buy you happiness obviously didn’t have enough of the stuff.” (394)
“Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.” (396)
“I lied, yes, but that doesn’t make me a liar. Lying’s wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.” (400)
“What happens in a minute’s time is made by what you do.” (401)
“Oaks live for six hundred years. Two hundred to grow, two hundred to live, two hundred to die.” (402)
“All I want out of life is life.” (413)
“It’s a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.” (418)
“Truth doesn’t care who discovers it, so why should you?” (421)
“Yo! Amaba! A! Ese! Jodido! Perro!” (427)
“Luisa is distracted by a strange gravity that makes her pause for a moment and look at its rigging, listen to its wooden bones creaking. She grasps for the ends of this elastic moment, but they disappear into the past and future.” (430)
“My problems are mine, and yours are yours, and this one is yours.” (441)
“We cut a pack of cards called historical context - our generation, Sixsmith, cut tens, jacks, and queens. Adrian’s cut threes, fours, and fives. That’s all.” (442)
“We had run out of infinity.” (442)
“Wars do not combust without warning.” (444)
“Science devises even bloodier means of war until humanity's power of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilization drives itself into extinction.” (444)
“In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky?” (445)
“Wars are never cured, they just go into remission for a few years.” (453)
“Because a man like me has no business with this substance “beauty,” yet here she is, in these soundproofed chambers of my heart.” (454)
“But place its mouth against your ear and you hear the world in a different way.” (458)
“All boundaries are conventions, national ones too. One may transcend any convention, if only one can first conceive of doing so.” (460)
“The healthy can’t understand the emptied, the broken.” (469)
“The very same. Fancy that. Around we go.” (469)
“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, Cortés'll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian'll be blown to pieces again, you and I'll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I'll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you'll read this letter again, the sun'll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.” (482)
“Aye, look like Eden it might, but Raiatea is a fallen place, same as everywhere, aye, no snakes, but the Devil plies his trade here as much as anywhere else.” (483)
“It’s all rats’ nests & rubble now. That’s what all beliefs turn to one day. Rats’ nests & rubble.” (486)
“The weak are the meat the strong do eat.” (489)
“This rapacity, yes, powers out Progress; for ends infernal or divine I know not.” (489)
“Had I but known! I could have helped the child jump ship, deflect his destiny as the Channings did mine, or help him understand that no state of tyranny reigns forever.” (500)
“Jackson, when you are a grown man do not permit your profession to sunder you from loved ones.” (501)
“Maoris prey on Moriori, Whites prey on darker-hued cousins, fleas prey on mice, cats prey on rats, Christians on infidels, first mates on cabin boys, Death on the Living. ‘The weak are the meat the strong do eat.’” (503)
“‘Tis hey, ho! for the open road.” (504)
“Autua’s heart beat against my side, encouraging my own.” (505)
“A distinct hill rose up & its name stirred in memory’s sediment: - Diamond Head.” (506)
“In Honolulu’s lawless hive, where vessels of all flags & nations arrive & depart daily, a man may change his name & history between entree & dessert.” (506)
“My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles though an unhurried eternity. My thoughts flow thus. Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrast, however. To wit: history admits no rules: only outcomes.” (507)
“A purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost.” (508)
“It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.” (508)
“A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth living.” (508)
“‘Your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!’ Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?” (509)