The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

I think of Big Mac’s aphorism: In order to have sex, women need to feel loved; but in order for men to feel loved, we need to have sex.

‘A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a journey: the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter.’ ”

the Filipino-run supermarket sells Mountain Dew, Skittles, and Cheetos.

‘If love is an enchanted dream, then marriage is an alarm clock.’

Wrong turns teach us the right way.”

Like all belongers, the Sykeses and Webbers don’t notice how easily they slip into groups, lines, ranks, gangs. But we nonbelongers know what we are, all right.

At the sink, he tentatively reaches out for the soap dispenser; a frothy blob blooms and drops onto his hand. “Look at that! Life’s more science-fictiony by the day. It’s not just that you get old and your kids leave; it’s that the world zooms away and leaves you hankering for whatever decade you felt most comfy in.”

“Enjoy Aoife while you can, Ed. One moment you’re carrying this lovable little tyke on your shoulders, the next she’s off, and you realize what you suspected all along: However much you love them, your own children are only ever on loan.”

Ultimately, wars escalate by eating their own shit, shitting bigger and eating bigger.”

Ye have your invitation to Sheep’s Head, Ed. Use it before it expires. Or before I do.” I tell her, “You look pretty indestructible to me.” “We all of us have less time than we think, Ed.”

what’s this prodding certainty that I’m in a labyrinth not only of turnings and doors but decisions and priorities, that I’ve been in it not just a minute or two but ages, years, and that I took some bad turns many years ago that I can’t get back to,

pullulant

au fait

Crispin, bury that hatchet. Hatchets don’t work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself.

Men marry women hoping they’ll never change. Women marry men hoping they will. Both parties are disappointed,

I see my reflection in the mirrored wall, and recall a wise man telling me that the secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you’re over forty. This year I’ll be fifty.

as the Arabic proverb has it, not even God can change the past.

Modesty is Vanity’s craftier stepbrother.

“A book can’t be a half fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant.

Mum said I’d learn betrayals came in various shapes and sizes, but to betray someone’s dream is the unforgivable one.

“Beware of asking people to question what’s real and what isn’t. They may reach conclusions you didn’t see coming.”

Reykjavik’s a good place to work. Iceland’s like Ireland; being famous here’s nothing special.”

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.

A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned.”

“Art feasts upon its maker,”

My favorite line from Roth’s The Human Stain: “Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.”

Many nondeaf people do not guess that deaf people can enjoy music in various ways,

“Attaining immortality is easier than controlling its terms and conditions.”

One cannot cross the same river twice.

If you love and are loved, whatever you do affects others.

Her only friends on the estate were books, and books can talk but do not listen.

Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless.

She knew a fudged answer when she heard it, and suggested that I preferred books to husbands. I agreed that books tended not to switch their stories whenever it suited them.

“A wrongheaded world,” sighed Shiloh Davydov, “where women needs must deny their gender for fear that their ideas will be dismissed.”

All great cities do and must revert to jungle, tundra, or tidal flats, if you wait long enough,

Some magic is merely normality that you’re not yet used to.”

the difference between reading a love poem and being in love.

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

As she lit a new cigarette from the dying ember of the last one, she told me this: “Sweetheart, you’ll be astounded by what you can live with.” Life has taught me that she was right.

Fatalism’s a weak antidepressant,

There’s a link between bigotry and bad spelling.

People listen to reason.” “Reason?” Aileen Jones is grimly cheerful. “Like my old doctor friend Greg used to say, if you could reason with religious people, there wouldn’t be any religious people.

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. My molar throbs, the pain in my right side is jaggedy, rheumatism rusts my knuckles and knees, and if my body was a car I’d have traded it in, years ago.

what’s real changes. If life didn’t change, it wouldn’t be life, it’d be a photograph.” I snip the hairs up his neck. “Even photos change, mind. They fade.”

Civilization’s like the economy, or Tinkerbell: If people stop believing it’s real, it dies.

For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of.