quotes by Reif Larsen

"I had trouble listening to adults who didn't really mean anything that they said; it was as if their language poured into my ears only to drain right out a little spigot in the back of my head."
— Reif Larsen (The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet)

"Outside, there was that predawn kind of clarity, where the momentum of living has not quite captured the day. The air was not filled with conversation or thought bubbles or laughter or sidelong glances. Everyone was sleeping, all of their ideas and hopes and hidden agendas entangled in the dream world, leaving this world clear and crisp and cold as a bottle of milk in the fridge. "
— Reif Larsen (The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet)

"I would not know what to say to you, except this: there was never a map that got it all right, and truth and beauty were never married to one another for long."
— Reif Larsen (The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet)

"I suddenly missed the curious shelving patterns of my room, those old planks from the barn groaning under the weight of the notebooks. Shelving is an intimate thing, like the fingerprint of a room."
— Reif Larsen (The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet)

"The sun was crouched on its haunches over the Pioneers. The mountains were both purple and brown, the angle of light hitting the moiré of pine and fir and bleeding out a smoky mirage that made the valley seem to tremble. It was a sight. We both looked."
— Reif Larsen (The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet)

" "I'm a practicing Zen Buddhist and I'm influenced by my readings in that tradition, such as the notion that everyone is born a perfect being and we spend most of our lives with a clouded vision trying to realize our perfection," he says. At critical moments in the book, T.S. registers his inkling of this realization. When he makes his maps, it feels like taking down dictation from the universe.
"
— Reif Larsen