The Ministry of Time

by Kaliane Bradley

“There’ll be germs on your shoes and under your nails. It’s just how the world works. An aseptic environment is. Well. It’s a dead one.” “I won’t be participating.”

“History is not a series of causes and effects which may be changed like switching trains on a track. It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening.

Ideas are frictional, factional entities which wilt when pinned to flowcharts. Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions.

You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others.

I didn’t understand how anyone could find power in a show of vulnerability. Power was influence, was money, was the person holding the gun.

“You know, when you are out of my sight, I fear I’ve imagined you.

Graham, I think, was one of the few people I’d ever met who could face death with that defiant cigarette, and that was partly because he was a nervous smoker.

“Is the world a ship?” “Everything is a ship. This little house is a ship.”

Everything that has ever been could have been prevented, and none of it was. The only thing you can mend is the future.

The harder I kicked at it, the thicker the callus on my mind became. Yes, I thought, through a plaque of dead thoughts. If I had a gun, I could clean this all up.

“In this era, I think we’d call that ‘dishonest.’ ” “In my era, it might have been considered a kindness.”

being in love is a form of blunt-force trauma.

If you ever fall in love, you’ll be a person who was in love for the rest of your life.

“Don’t ask me about the things that I remember,” he muttered. I put my hands through his hair and he put his face in my neck. “Please,” he murmured.

“I will break him, bone by bone. Sixteen would have wanted me at peace, but I cannot obey it. He was as a brother to me. A man of marble where all others are of clay.”