The Echo Maker Quotes
"Cranes keep landing as night falls. Ribbons of them roll down, slack against the sky."
"Twilight comes early, as it will for a few more weeks."
"In this light, something saurian still clings to them: the oldest flying things on earth, one stutter-step away from pterodactyls."
"Half a million birds—four-fifths of all the sandhill cranes on earth—home in on this river."
"Tonight’s cranes mill again on the braided water."
"By morning, that sound never happened. Again there is only here, now, the river’s braid."
"The dawn sandhills start to dance. Dance as they have since before this river started."
"Driving off the road, in central Nebraska—like falling off a wooden horse."
"Water that is nothing but into nothing falls."
"She found Good Samaritan the way the birds found the Platte."
"I am No One but Tonight on North Line Road GOD led me to you so You could Live and bring back someone else."
"Flock of fiery cinders. When gray pain of them thins, then always water."
"A room of machines, the space he can’t reach."
"Words change to flying things as they hit the air."
"Home was the place you never escape, even in nightmare."
"People don’t have ideas. Ideas have everything."
"His body, countless microscopic creatures banded together in need."
"Only his heart, as big as the courthouse, keeps pounding."
"Other times, a mud flat, flow in an inch of water."
"Always with the look, with the listen, with the see what I mean."
"Live things make such sounds, just to say what silence says better."
"Animals must be more like rocks. Saying only what they are."
"Loves just lying still in the world buzz, all channels at once pouring through his skin."
"No one always knows what he means. This can’t bother him. He doesn’t really, either."
"A longer now, a shorter then, living in the place he’s just come from."
"Most times when they’re talking, nothing happens. Nothing but what’s already right here."
"He lay in bed, still shaking. 'See?' She hushed and lied to him, saying she saw."
"Nobody’s ever who they were. We just have to watch and listen. See where he’s going. Meet him there."
"The timelessness of animals: the kinds of sounds her brother made, crawling out of his coma."
"The embrace lifted her up above the last few weeks. Her body gave in to cold spring elation."
"Cranes that crowded into dense bird cities now scatter. They fly in families, lifelong mates with their one or two offspring, any that have survived the previous year."
"Spring spreads across the Arctic to their archaic cries."
"Their nest is a moated heap of plants and feathers, three feet wide."
"Suppose birds store, fixed as a photograph, the outlines of what they have seen."
"The parents trade off hunting for the voracious young, feeding them constantly—seeds and insects, small rodents, the trapped spare energy of the Arctic."
"In July, the younger colt starves to death, killed by his older brother’s appetite."
"There must be symbols in the birds’ heads, something that says again."
"He walked south through the unbearably normal streets, thinking he might get by just fine without ever seeing this city again."
"A correspondent Weber had stopped replying to months before sent another objection to the treatment of religious feelings and the temporal lobe in The Three-Pound Infinity."
"Humans probably being the only creatures who can have memories of things that never happened."
"The utter estrangement of it: I’ve a feeling we’re not in New York anymore."
"True Capgras resulting from closed-head trauma: the odds against it were unimaginable."
"A case so definitive challenged any psychological account of the condition and undermined basic assumptions about cognition and recognition."
"To selectively reject one’s next of kin, in the face of all evidence…"
"Another chance to see, up close, through the rarest imaginable lens, just how treacherous the logic of consciousness was."
"How does the brain erect a mind, and how does the mind erect everything else?"
"Master the neural assemblage, and we might at long last master us."
"They resembled each other so much that there could be no strangeness of desire between them."
"The basic riddle, on the verge of being solved."
"He’s not a cow killer, or anything. That’s Rupp. Mark repairs their equipment."
"It’s not like I’m rooting through his things."
"His buddy Tom Rupp got him a job at the IBP plant in Lexington."
"Consciousness works by telling a story, one that is whole, continuous, and stable. When that story breaks, consciousness rewrites it."
"We’re more like coral reefs, complex but fragile ecosystems."
"Everything about Hayes radiated healthy skepticism. But the first rule of medicine was to do something."
"Clouds drift as days pass; Night rain drops tears of flowers."
"Among the pine trees, cranes remember The music and songs of years ago."
"You can be here. You can stay here, with me."
"Small steps, just for a little while. Just until Mark…"
"The brain became the Internet, a distributed network, more than two hundred modules in loose, mutually modifying chatter with other modules."
"Everybody gets repaid, one way or another. Let’s see how things go."
"His need for her tore her up, worse than her own helplessness."
"Karin considered bundling him back into Bonnie’s car and returning him to Dedham Glen."
"He was staring at her, searching for someone, the one she had been once but wasn’t any longer."
"The strength of his memory for the smallest particulars gave her forbidden hope."
"She herself could no longer recognize her own condo, on those quick trips to South Sioux City to ready it for sale."
"All living things hid themselves in the face of this epidemic."
"Every desperate feat of memory fed him a little."
"The gesture thrilled her more than anything since his return to speech."
"Love, in an earthworm, might never extinguish at all."
"Mark studied her. 'How do you know they can’t?'"
"Exactly what I’m saying. But thanks for admitting it. Simplifies life a little."
"Life is not about collecting the moments, but making each moment count."
"We live in the thought and image and memory of [our bodies]."
"The world had no place left, real or imagined, where he might put down."
"Love was not the antidote to Capgras. Love was a form of it."
"The body was the only home we had, and even it was more a postcard than a place."
"The mind might not endure its self-discovery."
"The arc of her own life no longer led anywhere."
"The years ahead collapsed, burying her under their dead weight."
"Every little thing I do to help, I hurt him in three other ways."
"I can't leave yet. I forgot. The note from Dr. Weber."
"I'm working through some papers… Did you know that we’ve changed that river more in one hundred years than in all the ten thousand years prior…?"
"There's so much shit I have to ask him. The man bailed out of here so fast, you'd think I had tried to queer him."
"You remember when you and Dad tried to clean out that backed-up cistern?"
"All growing boys do that kind of thing with each other, at least once."
"I mean, can you remember his voice? The way he walked? Who was that guy?"
"You remember how proud she was, about that award her family won when she was little?"
"Save the birds? Save the river? What about saving me?"
"You're the only one who can answer me this. I have no choice but to trust you."
"Maybe well-being meant more than official sanity."
"Together would be very helpful, right around now."
"Because if I’d been born sixty years earlier, I’d be dead by now."
"The self presents itself as whole, willful, embodied, continuous, and aware."
"The we that does the willing is not the we that we think we are."
"The brain was a set of changes for mirroring change."
"Use or lose. Use and lose. You chose, and the choice unmade you."
"Because being with her made him feel familiar. Like coming home."
"Memory. It’ll screw you up royal every time, huh?"
"The self spread thin on everything it looked at, changed by every ray of the changing light."