The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

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

I’m trying not to act all shy, ’cause that might give my age away, but they aren’t going to be plumbers or hairdressers or bin collectors: They’ll be computer programmers or teachers or solicitors, and it shows. It’s in how they speak. They use precise words, like they own them,

I think about pinball, and how being a kid’s like being shot up the firing lane and there’s no veering left or right; you’re just sort of propelled. But once you clear the top, like when you’re sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, suddenly there’s a thousand different paths you can take, some amazing, others not.

while the wealthy are no more likely to be born stupid than the poor, a wealthy upbringing compounds stupidity while a hardscrabble childhood dilutes it, if only for Darwinian reasons.

How she says that makes me afraid Aoife’s childhood’s a book I’m flicking through instead of reading properly.

“The one in the carwash. Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well.” Pens scratch. “Oh, and beware of the verb ‘seem’; it’s a textual mumble. And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better.

We live on, as long as there are people to live on in.

Once upon a time “my body” meant “me,” pretty much, but now “me” is my mind and my body is a selection box of ailments and aches.