Cloud Atlas Quotes
"If there be any eyrie so desolate, or isle so remote, that one may there resort unchallenged by an Englishman, ’tis not down on any map I ever saw."
"Teeth, sir, are the enameled grails of the quest in hand."
"Nor shall I enlighten you, sir, for ’tis a professional secret!"
"A week is needed to render the Prophetess 'Bristol fashion.'"
"I am now versed enough in Antipodese etiquette to let such unlikely truths lie."
"Next yuletide, just as that scented She-Donkey is addressing her Ambassadors’ Ball, I, Henry Goose, yes, I shall arise & declare to one & all that our hostess masticates with cannibals’ gnashers!"
"I withdrew ere the liquid was swapped for a more obdurate missile."
"The prospect of Walker & his ilk felling the trees & selling the dendroglyphs to collectors offends my conscience."
"As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself."
"One part of me wanted that voyage never to end."
"Hadn’t even waited until I’d shaved—breathtaking vulgarity of these ruffians."
"If one will just be still, shut up, and listen—lo, behold, the world’ll sift through one’s ideas for one."
"One can spot a fellow musician in any context, even amongst policemen."
"Her mount is a beaut—one can’t blame the horse."
"An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton."
"Every conscience has an off switch somewhere."
"Anything is true if enough people believe it is."
"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."
"Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman."
"Guilt? None. A cuckolder's triumph? Not specially, no."
"And when the hydrogen buildup blows the roof off the containment chamber? When prevailing winds shower radiation over California?"
"I proved it. I proved it. You couldn’t buy me, so you tried intimidation. I let you, Lord forgive me, but no longer."
"Use logic. If I’m lying, you’re still back in England safe and sound—with your report. If I’m not lying, you’re dead."
"Definition of the Week. What’s a conservative? A mugged liberal."
"‘Getting emotional won’t help’? Is that all you can offer, Mr. Frum? Yeah, buddy, you’re damn right I’ll be seeking legal counsel!"
"The world’s Alberto Grimaldis can fight scrutiny by burying truth in committees, dullness, and misinformation, or by intimidating the scrutinizers."
"No drug, no religious experience touches you like turning a man into a corpse."
"Our sole weapon is public outrage. Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, ousted Nixon, and in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam."
"The dumbest dog can sit and watch. What takes brains is knowing when to look away."
"Don’t underestimate yourself. Friendly journalists make valuable allies. If there comes a time when you want to discuss any matters weightier than how many french fries the Swannekke engineers consume per annum—such as data on the HYDRA reactor as compiled by Dr. Sixsmith, purely for example, I guarantee you’ll find me much more cooperative than you think."
"Power. What do we mean? ‘The ability to determine another man’s luck.’"
"The pragmatic journalist’s daughter would, and did, explain these "memories" as the work of an imagination hypersensitized by her father’s recent death, but a detail in one letter will not be dismissed."
"The only experience my creditors have of the law is squatting over a can in an overcrowded cell."
"Knuckle Sandwich was actually a well-written, gutsy fictional memoir."
"I once dated a girl who called her car Rosinante, for Chrissakes."
"We cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters."
"Not all promises are made to be broken; some are made just to be made."
"To this day I cannot hear Rachmaninoff without flinching."
"Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths."
"Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present."
"Knowledge is a mirror, and for the first time in my life, I was allowed to see who I was and who I might become."
"Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future."
"I understand now, the boundaries between noise and sound are conventions."
"All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended."
"The sense of anonymity afforded by my hood was delicious."
"What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent excellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge?"
"Fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods’ consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror."
"History suggests, not until they are made to."
"My curiosity is dying, I told Professor Mephi one pleasant day, during a seminar on Thomas Paine."
"The past is a world both indescribably different from and yet subtly similar to Nea So Copros."
"Time is the speed at which the past decays, but disneys enable a brief resurrection."
"You don’t remedy them. You live through them."
"Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an’ made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o’ humans, yay, a hunger for more."
"An’ what happ’ned? Three days later Catkin was back learnin’ in the school’ry, yay."
"Old Uns’d got the Smart o’ gods but the savagery o’ jackals an’ that’s what tripped the Fall."
"Souls cross the skies o’ time, like clouds crossin’ skies o’ the world."
"I don’t say that yarn’s got a hole sack o’ sense, but I always mem’ried it, an’ times are less sense is more sense."
"The savage sat’fies his needs now. He’s hungry, he’ll eat. He’s angry, he’ll knuckly."
"An’ 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."
"Old Ma Yibber keeps her slurryful mouth corked outside Nine Valleys."
"You have chosen your friends wisely, Sonmi. Together, we may change corpocratic civilization out of all recognition."
"That such an insignificant-looking dot can confer all the rights of consumerdom on its bearers yet condemn the rest of corpocracy to servitude seemed, and seems still, a bizarre obscenity to me."
"All rising suns set, Archivist. Our corpocracy now smells of senility."
"No crime of such magnitude could take root in Nea So Copros. Even fabricants have carefully defined rights, guaranteed by the Chairman!"
"Once I had finished my manifesto, the next stage could only be my arrest."
"But hate men like Seer Kwon, and you hate the whole world."
"A clock with no hands. 'Freedom!' is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is."
"Noakes’s voice vibrated like a pennywhistle. 'Mr. Cavendish! Stand!'"
"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."
"I made it to Boxing Day because I was too miserable to hang myself."
"Ernie stood over a washing machine in pieces on newspapers. 'Look who it isn’t.'"
"Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable?"
"Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach."
"If you don’t get me out of here … I’ll lose my mind."
"I don’t believe I had smiled since the Frankfurt Book Fair. My face hurt."
"My gratitude that my friends were talking to me again, and my desperation to get out of Aurora House—alive—muted my natural prudence, I can only suppose."
"Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead."
"The Sixsmith Report, not my car. My body would be a bonus."
"Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk."
"In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul."
"Seaboard’s share price on Wall Street leaped 40 points in response to the news."
"I don’t do this sort of thing often enough to be an expert."
"Sounds of laughter and dogs are carried from the dunes as Luisa and Napier cross the clubhouse garden and descend the steps to the sizable marina."
"Despite their mission, 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."
"It’s okay to be spooked. I’m spooked myself."
"Put the report on the table, Luisa. I don’t want blood on it."
"The killer closes the cabin door behind him. 'Well, you get to make peace with your maker.'"
"I’ve done my duty, I’m dying, for Chrissakes."
"His lifeblood spreads obscenely quickly, obscenely scarlet, obscenely shiny."
"The trigger resists his index finger—then a blaze of incredible noise spins Bill Smoke backwards, his arms flailing like a marionette’s."
"My administration makes no distinction between lawbreakers."
"The air was stuffy as if the sky were sealing us in."
"Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots, and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war."
"The League of Nations? Surely nations knew laws other than warfare?"
"What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature."
"That’s what all beliefs turn to one day. Rats’ nests & rubble."
"Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world."
"A purely predatory world shall consume itself."
"The world is wicked. Maoris prey on Moriori, Whites prey on darker-hued cousins, fleas prey on mice, cats prey on rats."