David Mitchell

“The art teacher's scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. 'As the title suggests,' Mr Dunwoody saw the book'd caught my attention, 'it's about the history of opticians. What are you about?”

“Disco's are tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don't.”

“But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.”

“But,' I ducked the subject, 'don't heaps of artists use pseudonyms?' 'Who?' 'Um . . .' Only Cliff Richard and Sid Vicious came to mind.”

“Writing poetry's,' I looked around the solarium, but Madame Crommelynck's got a tractor beam, 'sort of . . . gay.' '"Gay"? A merry activity?' This was hopeless. 'Writing poems is . . . what creeps and poofters do.' 'So are you one of these „creeps”? 'No.' 'Then you are a „pooof-ter”, whatever one is?' 'No!' 'Then your logic is eluding me.”

“There are so many cities in every single city.”

“Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?”

“Go on, my dear," urges the snake. "Take one. Hear it? 'Pluck me,' it's saying. That big, shiny red one. 'Pluck me, pluck me now and pluck me hard.' You know you want to.""But God," quotes Eve, putting out feelers for an agent provacateur, clever girl, "expressly forbids us to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.""Ah yessssss, God ... But God gave us life, did He not? And God gave us desire, did He not? And God gave us taste, did He not? And who else but God made the damned apples in the first place? So what else is life for but to tassste the fruit we desire?"Eve folds her arms schoolgirlishly. "God expressly forbade it. Adam said."The snake grins through his fangs, admiring Eve's playacting. "God is a nice enough chap in His way. I daresay He means well. But between you and The Tree of Knowledge, He is terribly insecure.""Insecure? He made the entire bloody universe! He's omnipotent.""Exactly! Almost neurotic, isn't it? All this worshiping, morning, noon, and night. It's 'Oh Praise Him, Oh Praise Him, Oh Praise the Everlassssting Lord.' I don't call that omnipotent. I call it pathetic. Most independent authorities agree that God has never sufficiently credited the work of virtual particles in the creation of the universssse. He raises you and Adam on this diet of myths while all the really interesting information is locked up in these juicy apples. Seven days? Give me a break.”

“Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.”

“The silences after his last gasp were sung together by a blackbird. I lay there, my eyes unable to close. His were unable to open. I listed the places where I hurt, and how much. My loins felt ripped. Something inside had torn. There were seven places on my body where he had sunk his fangs into my skin and bitten. He'd dug his nails into my neck, and twisted my head to one side, and clawed my face. I hadn't made a noise. He had made all the noise for both of us. Had it hurt him?”

“How about this? Hong Kong had been appropriated by British drug pushers in the 1840s. We wanted Chinese silk, porcelain, and spices. The Chinese didn't want our clothes, tools, or salted herring, and who can blame them? They had no demand. Our solution was to make a demand, by getting large sections of the populace addicted to opium, a drug which the Chinese government had outlawed. When the Chinese understandably objected to this arrangement, we kicked the fuck out of them, set up a puppet government in Peking that hung signs on parks saying NO DOGS OR CHINESE, and occupied this corner of their country as an import base. Fucking godawful behavior, when you think about it. And we accuse them of xenophobia. It would be like the Colombians invading Washington in the early twenty-first century and forcing the White House to legalize heroin. And saying, "Don't worry, we'll show ourselves out, and take Florida while we're at it, okay? Thanks very much.”

“Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.”

“If your words're true, they're armed.”

“Probably" is a word with an emergency ejector seat.”

“Maybe then you comprehend, speaking one language only is a prison!”

“His skin was blotched as a dying banana.”

“Don't let death, Jacob reproves himself, be your final thought.”

“Naming, thinks Jacob, even in ridicule, gives what is named substance.”

“Self pity, Orito reminds herself yet again, is a noose dangling from a rafter.”

“We were, to quote the proverb, "The one dog who barks at nothing answered by a thousand dogs barking at something...”

“People b'lief the world is built soan' tellin'em it ain't so caves the roof on their heads 'n'maybe yours.”

“Creation unfolds, around us, despite us and through us, at the speed of days and nights, and we like to call it "love”

“I wonder how many years Suga has been carrying his curse around with him. I forget that other people in the world have broken parts too.”

“To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you assume we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes.”

“Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. "Oy!" yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. "There's a fackin' queue!"Never apologize, advises Lloyd George. Say it again, only this time, ruder. "I know there's a 'fackin' queue'! I already queued in it once and I am not going to queue in it again just because Nina Simone over there won't sell me a ruddy ticket!"A colored yeti in a clip-on uniform swooped. "Wassa bovver?""This old man here reckons his colostomy bag entitles him to jump the queue," said the skinhead, "and make racist slurs about the lady of Afro-Caribbean extraction in the advance-travel window."I couldn't believe I was hearing this.”

“Temple of the Rat King. Ark of the Soot God. Sphincter of Hades. Yes, King's Cross Station, where, according to Knuckle Sandwich, a blow job costs only five quid - any of the furthest-left three cubicles in the men's lavvy downstairs, twenty-four hours a day.”

“The night in question, I had put aside my perpetual lavatory read, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because of all the manuscripts (inedible green tomatoes) submitted to Cavendish-Redux, my new stable of champions. I suppose it was about eleven o'clock when I heard my front door being interfered with. Skinhead munchkins mug-or-treating?Cherry knockers? The wind?Next thing I knew, the door flew in off its ruddy hinges! I was thinking al-Queda, I was thinking ball lightning, but no. Down the hallway tramped what seemed like an entire rugby team, though the intruders numbered only three. (You'll notice, I am always attacked in threes.) "Timothy," pronounced the gargoyliest, "Cavendish, I presume. Caught with your cacks down.""My business hours are eleven to two, gentlemen," Bogart would have said, "with a three-hour break for lunch. Kindly leave." All I could do was blurt, "Oy! My door! My ruddy door!”

“As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.”

“Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?”

“Maailma ei lakkaa purkamasta sitä minkä on rakentanut. Miksi maailmassa pitäisi olla järkeä?”

“Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.”

“I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head. No Jacob's ladder this, no, but rather Civilization's Ladder, if you will.”

“I...asked why purebloods despised me so. He replied, 'What if the difference between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?... fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror”

“War's never a picnic. Although obviously soldiers do end up eating outdoors quite a lot.”

“The weak are meat the strong do eat.”

“Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”

“Men invented money Women invented mutual aid”

“Whoever dies with the most stuff wins.”

“Our ancestors built temples for their gods. We build department stores.”

“During those nine pouched-up months, what do babies imagine? Gills, swamps, battlefields? To people in wombs, what is imagined and what is real must be one and the same.”

“If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.”

“Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous.”

“There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small, worn parks. Another way to make your place is TV. A bright, brash place, always well lit, full of fun and jokes that tell you when to laugh so you never miss them. World news carefully edited so that it’s not too disturbing, but disturbing enough to make you glad that you weren’t born in a foreign country. News with music to tell you who to hate, who to feel sorry for, and who laugh at.”

“Better a soulless clone... than a souled roach.”

“You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.”

“The learnin' mind is the livin' mind... an' any sort o' smart is truesome smart, old smart or new, high smart or low.”

“Women, oh, women! They'll find the baddest meanin' in your words an' hold it up, sayin', Look what you attacked me with!”

“How gleefully life shreds our well crafted plans.”

“The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed”