The Long Earth Quotes
"For a while he was content to lie there in the blissful quiet."
"Well, if he was dead then this would do for a heaven, after the hell of noise and screams and mud."
"What was the use of worrying? It was really not worthwhile, not when you have just seen men evaporate like the dew of the morning."
"The truth is that we are as baffled by the phenomenon as Dante would have been if he’d suddenly been given a glimpse of Hubble’s expanding universe."
"Once upon a time you would have been called a celebrity."
"It’s history, a reconstruction. It’ll be on Discovery next year; check it out."
"The hardiest sailor has always known that there’s someone out there somewhere."
"You might as well outlaw breathing. Even my own mother has stepped!"
"It’s hard to dig a grave with a wooden shovel in one hand while holding a plastic gun in the other."
"I brought back photographic records. Proof of what you said, you see?"
"Property? The physics of the Long Earth means that every one of us can have a world entirely to himself, if he so wishes."
"The rewards to you, should you agree to accompany me, will be excessively generous."
"Your unique stepping talent, your ability to step unaided and, more important, to recover quickly from each step, will be useful if trouble strikes."
"There had been that trouble not long after Step Day, when men with badges had pushed their way into the Home and tried to send him to sleep so they could take him away."
"It’s all there, mates. It’s all been left there waiting for us, since the beginning."
"And sometimes the blokes came back for a beer."
"The Long Earth is stranger than anybody thinks."
"The over-armed in pursuit of the over-armoured: the result of an evolutionary arms race."
"Just tell me when to run, OK? I don’t mind if you say right now …"
"I have no fillings. I always brushed my teeth properly."
"Anything that I perceive is attempting to do harm to you will be dead before it knows it."
"Choose a song and sing. Something jaunty … just sing the song!"
"A little while ago you were expecting to be viciously attacked, yes?"
"A gift has a worth that has little to do with any currency."
"We live and we learn, my friend, and be grateful that you still have the chance to do both."
"Don’t stand too close to a Tibetan chopping wood."
"I could kill you with a single blow; if necessary, these arms could serve as pile drivers."
"In the dialect that gives us 'twain', meaning the number two, 'trine' means three."
"Practically everything bothers me, especially the things I don’t know, and can’t control."
"My mental health is optimal, however. I think this needs to be said."
"The airship drifted over a river that had shrivelled in its bed, exposing wide borders of cracked mud."
"Something might just come up from the depths and you will depart this and all other worlds with a sound that might be accurately described as 'clop'."
"We must learn something of the social lives of these creatures."
"There have been trees on this planet for three hundred million years."
"The old sheep of the Lake District: very fine poet, but somehow 'exploring on the Wordsworth' does not quite have the appropriate ring, does it?"
"You can feel the difference if you step even just a world or two to either side. A world with humans in, versus a world without."
"But in general crime was low, per capita, out in the Long Earth, when the social pressures that sparked so much crime and disorder on the Datum were largely absent."
"And then, to cap it all, you took an allotment, and are seen digging and planting and in general tilling the soil of the Good Earth, and that got everybody on your side."
"This was a part of England miraculously untouched by the Long Earth. Or even, as far as Nelson could see, the twenty-first century."
"Nature generally isn’t like that, and nor were dinosaurs. Nature, by and large, is either reasonably silent, or earth-shakingly noisy."
"We are now many hundreds of thousands of steps from the Datum, Joshua. In this remote world we’re seeing representatives of many of the animal orders we have on our branch of the probability tree, but as if reimagined."
"She didn’t react; she was carefully retrieving the last wayward oyster in the pan with a stick."
"But the rules are different now. It is a certainty that the volcano under Yellowstone National Park on Datum Earth will become aggressively active in the near future. And what will happen? People will step away."
"For the first time in human history, such a calamity will be a nuisance rather than a tragedy."
"Humans start with the world as it is and try to make it different. And that's what makes them interesting."
"Cooking responds to care; if you do things right, then it goes well. It is dependable, and I like dependable things."
"We're dealing with some kind of genuine psychic phenomenon."
"There's no substitute for people, I know that."
"The most precious thing that we can find is another human being."
"We're both scared. But we're going to face this, right? You won't run away. Animals flee. The trolls have to flee. We keep on going, trying to find out what scares us, and deal with it. That's what humans do."
"Elephants are the same, aren't they? Aware of the significance of bones, either as a signature of threat, or of the death of one of their kind."
"Later, Joshua realized he should have been paying attention, especially in the final few minutes."
"Then the gravity came back, and blue sky unfolded."
"Joshua said, ‘We found the Joker of Jokers, didn’t we?’"
"‘I don’t think it was the stepping.’ Sally rubbed her own stomach."
"Tibetan swearing, I think. Or possibly Klingon."
"We have run into nothing, Sally, pure nothing. Vacuum."
"That’s a particularly graphic imagination you have there, mister."
"‘We’ve come this far,’ Joshua said. ‘I vote we continue.’"
"What’s happening? Am I the only one who isn’t hearing anything?"
"‘Lobsang,’ Joshua asked, ‘is your port camera working?’"
"She. Not it. I think so. I hear my own voice asking me questions."
"She is a destroyer of worlds. An eater of souls."
"What would be the point of surviving a collision that scythes all life from a planet?"
"It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye."
"She wanted what they had. The one thing in the world she lacked …"
"We need to find a way to stop her panicking the trolls."
"And there were times when Lobsang scared me."
"The entirety of it, enslaved. With every resource dedicated to a single purpose."
"I believe I understand what is meant by breathless with adoration …"
"I need to get to the Home. Or where the Home would be …"
"She appears to be positively gravid with apparently healthy life forms."
"And then, when Lobsang two point zero launches the Mark Trine, I intend to be on board."
"‘All the kid knows is that the Firsters got hold of what they called a "suitcase nuke".’"
"This is the old way of living, or an imitation of it."
"Nothing but the Silence. What he had been hearing all his life, in the gaps between people."
"So people help each other. If you can step, do it."
"And did you notice? The traveller steps underwater. That’s a new one."
"Nevertheless somebody wants to start a war."