Railsea Quotes
"The situation is not as macabre as it sounds."
"He had hoped that this moment might bring clarity."
"The beauty of the tangle, that’s its very point."
"To windows, to guardrails! Everyone leaned into the whipping air."
"A monster. It roared, it soared, into the air."
"The universe stank of moldywarpe: blood, pee, musk & muck."
"At least the roosters had had a brief reprieve."
"Sham held out his hands full of terrified birdlings as if they were weapons."
"Desperately, he considered hurling the birds straight up."
"There is the downsky, that stretches two, three miles & a biscuit from the railsea up."
"So he waited. Stared out to railsea & back at the ruin."
"Was it shame or bravery that made Sham say yes?"
"It’s all rubbish," he said. The windows at his feet were open to the ground. He shivered to be so close to earth.
"I think I found the captain," Sham said quietly. "& I think the captain don’t want much rescuing."
"But they’re only one aspect of the hardland ecosystems, pinnacles on multiform animal pyramids."
"Almost everything wants to eat almost everything else."
"You do know," the doctor had said, "that you don’t have to obey orders?"
"Had to prick up the ears of the bloody mole rats & was I not telling you to get out? Now look!"
"A memory!" said Luck. Benightly raised an eyebrow & was about to ask more, but was distracted by the insistence of a local bravo challenging him to an arm-wrestle.
"You ever been?" said Sham. "Cambellia?" Vurinam pursed his lips. "Why would a person go there?"
"The Nuzland." Vurinam raised eyebrows. "Bloody hell, eh?"
"An updiver. She wasn’t just going into Cambellia: she was going to climb."
"It was an old cliché that the first step on hardland after weeks at railsea made you stumble again, the inertness of rock suddenly feeling mad as a trampoline."
"Whatever that silliness was," she had said, "it concerned neither molers nor doctors’ assistants."
"There was a family. At the centre of the railsea."
"THE BEST-LAID PLANS can go belly up, & Sham’s was not even best laid."
"It was twilight. Birds circled. The few interrail trees were thick & shaggy with them."
"People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire."
"There’s nowhere I’ll go & nothing I’ll not cross to reach it. My philosophy is not yellow."
"You’re a proper grown man now. You should join us. Three adults."
"The maintenance of a log is indispensable. A good officer will be diligent, & treat any such document, whether typed into a digital machine, handwritten on fine paper, tugged into the knot-writing of the northern railsea, or whatever, like the external memory it is."
"In his first days back in Streggeye, there was, for Sham, plenty of storytelling, some of it about stories."
"The thought of striking out to salvage-reefs unknown, the burrowing, the mining, dustdiving, the picking through shorelines of ancient trash—these activities quickened Sham’s blood."
"But then what? He had questions. Where did salvage end up? What happened when you’d found it? Who used it for what when whoever sold or bartered it did, to whomever?"
"People smart & scruffy, businesswomen & -men, tough-dressed mercenaries & buyable thugs. Trainsfolk. Bookish types. Dignitaries & explorers in the sumptuous or strange or barbarian clothes of their homelands. & everywhere salvors."
"A children’s game. So scholars say. Or a divination kit."
"That’s offterran, duh. That’s alt-salvage, that curlbug. From one of the celestial stopoffs."
"The care Sham felt for his mum & dad was care for lost strangers, dwelling on whom might feel disloyal to those who had raised him."
"But he was abruptly aware that he seemed to share with these two children in the image the fact that he was, technically, to be exact about it, an orphan."
"Dig. Find a piece. Take it to a salvage train. Dig more. Find another piece."
"I found a bat. I suppose that ain’t salvage, though. It’s my mate."
"What ran towards Sham, announcing its presence with throaty jeers, was incipient fightness, carried in the vectors of eight or nine aggressive young men & women."
"The germane issue is not whether, but how, to divide."
"Humanity learnt to ride the rails, & that motion made us what we are, a ferromaritime people."
"What word better could there be to symbolize the railsea that connects & separates all lands, than "&" itself?"
"He was still watched, he realised, by the little gang. & they, he saw, were watched by another young man, a wiry & quick-moving lad Sham wondered if he’d seen before."
"Sham followed the salvor’s directions. "Why’d you want to go there?" the locals asked, but they pointed the way."
"Depends on the day. Some days I wash decks. Some days I clean the heads & oh my oily hell I’d rather get smacked into the godsquabble."
"The upsky," Sham said distractedly. "The grundnorm. The horizon. All these edges. What stories d’you know about, y’know, the edge of the whole world?"
"We may be at railsea a long time," the captain said, voice cracking through the tubes. "Months. Years. This hunt will take us far. I am prepared. Will you come with me?"
"There are no trainspeople I’d rather have with me. We hunt for the glory of Streggeye, for the owners of this fine train."
"I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME," Sham said, "that I just don’t feel it."
"Come in." Caldera smiled. "We’re just at the end of lessons."
"There are people," Caldera said, "who say all of us have a Task—they’d say it like that, they wouldn’t say task, they’d say Task—& you’ll know what it is when you hear it."
"Our minds we salvage from history’s rubbish, & they are machines to make chaos into story."
"Because such noises are the snoring, the sleep-breathing of a railsea world, & it is the rails that dream us. We do not dream the rails."
"He heard railgulls, wind, dust sandpapering stone."
"Eventually what got him up was that he was bored of being terrified."
"Sham sat on the shore. Sort of fell onto it, cross-legged."
"Thinking of salvors made Sham think of the Shroakes."
"It was as if there was none left for anyone else."
"The more he worked, he realised, the quicker he worked."
"Believe me, most people really do want what they want."
"The captain still clenched her fist at him. Its lights winked, it rattled."
"My rigour, Mr. Vurinam, is such that I have both made & refused to make a sacrifice."
"He threw his unfinished nail-carved figure away."
"It felt strange to walk on tracks, let alone such tracks as these."
"Sham kept his eyes ahead, for hours, focusing on anything but the fall that hemmed them in."
"Daylight went & they continued walking, until even with torches the darkness made it dangerous."
"Maybe we'll feel it when they go. The train I mean. Maybe we'll feel it in the rails."
"A repeated rhythm—a subtle, unending hushing beat—came from up ahead."
"Heaven, the world beyond the railsea, was empty, & very long dead."
"The rail stopped. It did not double-back to rejoin itself in a loop."
"The end of the line. That's what they were looking for."
"It's a bill. They say this is what we owe them."
"The enormity of that water. It rose & fell back in lurching swells."
"The water tasted like tears. That was what Sham thought as he went down."
"I saw the end of the world, Sham thought, & ceased moving his body, & breathed out in streaming bubbles."
"Sham revels in crashing splash. He whoops in spray."