Heads up, this is a looong post, but it's pretty easy to read. I've got here a great, big dollop of quotes for you today! Here are some beautiful words and bits of wisdom from Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. This is definitely a book to read twice. It glints and glistens with intelligence.
"For though humanity's topsoil is fertile with talent, only one seed in ten thousand will ever flower--for want of discipline."
"hot glass office buildings where the blooms of youth harden into aged cacti like my penny-pinching brother."
"The Mighty Gibbon's assessment of history--'little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind'-- ticker-taped by for no apparent reason."
"Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage."
"Oh, bein' young ain't easy 'cos ev'rythin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' for the first time."
"But a mountain you're plannin' on climbin' ain't the same as the one you ain't."
"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."
"Travel far enough, you meet yourself."
" 'Fantasy. Lunacy.' All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities."
"I was not genomed to alter history, I told my fellow fugitive. Hae-Joo countered that no revolutionary ever was."
"Every nowhere is somewhere, Archivist."
"Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw."
"What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds."
"Middle age is flown, but 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 un Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all."
"Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible."
"Am a sentimental fool and I know it."
"We had run out of infinity."
"The nation-state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions."
"She should understand, the artist lives in two worlds."
"E.'s character depends on which angle you're looking from, a quality of superior opals."
"Because a man like me has no business with this substance 'beauty,' yet here she is, in these soundproofed chambers of my heart."
"All boundaries are conventions, national ones too."
"Now I'm a spent firework; but at least I've been a firework."
"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."
"Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core."
"People of shifting character unnerve me & Mr. Wagstaff was one such."
"At dawn the waves looked like mountain ranges tipped with gold as sunbeams slanted low under burgundy clouds."
"Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world."
"He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain...& 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?"
No comments:
Post a Comment