David Mitchell

“In the smoky firelight the two old men nodded off like a pair of ancient kings passing the aeons in their tumuli. Made a musical notation of their snores. Elgar is to be played by a bass tuba, Ayrs a bassoon.”

“So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?”

“Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror."I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.”

“...now I'm a spent firework; but at least I've been a firework.”

“The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.”

“Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.”

“It's a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.”

“The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts.”

“I made it to Boxing Day because I was too miserable to hang myself. I lie. I made it to Boxing Day because I was too cowardly to hang myself.”

“A Scot can turn a perfectly decent name into a head-butt.”

“It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.”

“Sobering to think how one accursed night of baccarat can alter a man's social standing so irreversibly.”

“…It's as if they actually think that what other people think of them somehow doesn't matter. I mean, I know we're all supposed to believe that, but obviously, none of us actually do. And nor should we, because it does! It does matter! And the people who genuinely believe it doesn't tend to be the very people who ought to care most what other people think of them, because what the other people are thinking is, 'No, actually, I don't think the Chinese are "up to something,"' or, 'You should use mouthwash,' or, 'Your mania for the collective socialization of agriculture will surely cause the deaths of millions,' or, 'Forty cats is too many cats.”

“Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book. Well, Mumsy, no, not really. Your beloved large-print sagas of rags, riches, and heartbreak were no camouflage against the miseries trained on you by the tennis ball launcher of life, were they? But, yes, Mum, there again, you have a point. Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”

“If, by happiness, you mean the absence of adversity I and all fabricants are the happiest stratum in corpocracy as genomicists insist. However, if happiness means the conquest of adversity or a sense of purpose, or the xercise of one’s will to power, then of all Nea So Copros’s slaves we surely are the most miserable.”

“Do ants get headaches?”

“Life is sheer bliss when it wants to be.”

“It was only a wasp,’ I say, ‘there are plenty more where they came from.’ This is not good enough for Tomomi: ‘There are plenty more humans where we come from, so does that make homicide okay?”

“... in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights", the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.”

“Dentro de todo secreto acecha el miedo a descubrirlo.”

“La risa es una blasfemia anárquica. Los tiranos hacen bien en temerla.”

“To get the crowd to cry Hosanna, you must first ride to town on an ass.”

“The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, itturns ever more perfect. And when it’s perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits theground it gets all mushed up. So it’s only absolutely perfect when it’s falling through the air,this way and that, for the briefest time!.!.!.”

“Perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility.”

“...where there's Hilo, oh, there's blissweed.”

“Our brains are dark globes lit by very distant stars.”

“Only the trombonist played on. That's trombonists for you.”

“True knowledge without xperience is food without sustenance”

“Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths.”

“It'll be all right." Julia's gentleness makes it worse. "In the end, Jace.""It doesn't feel very all right.""That's because it's not the end.”

“The organs of Venus are familiar to all, but oh, my brothers, the organ of Saturn is the bladder.”

“Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction”

“Anticipating the end of the world is humanity's oldest pastime”

“I pass through many Me's in the course of my day, each one selfish with his time. The Lying-in-Bed me and the Enjoying-the-Hot-Shower Me are particularly selfish. The Late Me loathes the pair of them.”

“Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.What precipitates acts? Belief.Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being, & history's Horroxes, Boerhaaves & Gooses shall prevail. You & I, the moneyed, the privileged, the fortunate, shall not fare so badly in this world, provided our luck holds. What of it if our consciences itch? Why undermine the dominance of our race, our gunships, our heritage & our legacy? Why fight the “natural” (oh, weaselly word!) order of things?Why? Because of this:—one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul. For the human species, selfishness is extinction.Is this the doom written within our nature?If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe that leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real. Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.”

“Why tinker with the plain truth that we hurry the darker races to their graves in order to take their land & its riches? Wolves don’t sit in their caves, concocting crapulous theories of race to justify devouring a flock of sheep! “Intellectual courage”? True “intellectual courage” is to dispense with these fig leaves & admit all peoples are predatory, but White predators, with our deadly duet of disease dust & firearms, are examplars of predacity par excellence, & what of it?”

“Our weaponry was not dropped onto our laps one morning. It is not manna from Sinai’s skies. Since Agincourt, the White man has refined & evolved the gunpowder sciences until our modern armies may field muskets by the tens of thousands! Aha!’ you will ask, yes, ‘But why us Aryans? Why not the Unipeds of Ur or the Mandrakes of Mauritius?’ Because, Preacher, of all the world’s races, our love—or rather our rapacity—for treasure, gold, spices & dominion, oh, most of all, sweet dominion, is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous! This rapacity yes, powers our Progress; for ends infernal or divine I know not. Nor do you know, sir. Nor do I overly care. I feel only gratitude that my Maker cast me on the winning side.”

“But, overall, I concluded the young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption thriller had potential. (The Ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, "But it's been done a hundred times before!" - as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!)”

“... 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 an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.”

“Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. "I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?”

“And for What, For What. No matter what you do it will never amount to anything but a single drop in a limitless ocean. What is an ocean but a multitude of drops.”

“Don't bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.”

“Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.”

“Dr. Upward was one of those Academy Award-winning Asses of Arrogance you find in educational administration, law or medicine.”

“How lazily "xperts" dismiss what they fail to understand!”

“We create models to explain nature, but the models wind up gatecrashing nature and driving away the original inhabitants.”

“The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.”

“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”

“Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father’s generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don’t recall its name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer’s profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, “Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!”How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. 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.”

“Old Rekohu’s claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori’s priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life.Consider this, Mr. D’Arnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans’s best guess) enshrine “Thou Shalt Not Kill” in word & in deed & frame an oral “Magna Carta” to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More’s Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? “Here,” declaimed Mr. D’Arnoq, “and where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!” (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, “I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble.”