The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

People are icebergs, with just a bit you can see and loads you can’t.

“S’pose heaven’s not like a painting that’s just hanging there forever, but more like … like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you’re alive, from passing cars, or … upstairs windows when you’re lost …”

Love’s pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.

Being born’s a hell of a lottery.

“Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it, many of the sane crave it, but the wise worry about its long-term side effects. Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul.

The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.”

“Love is the anesthetic applied by Nature to extract babies.”

“You only value something if you know it’ll end.”