The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

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.

“The world’s default mode is basic indifference. It’d like to care, but it’s just got too much on at the moment.”

“Rootlessness,” I opine, “is the twenty-first-century norm.” “You’re not wrong and that’s why we’re in the shit we’re in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker’s toss about anywhere?”

“Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.”

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

“Normal is whatever you have come to take for granted.

The young hold out for a time, but eventually even the hardiest patient gets reduced to a desiccated embryo, a Strudlebug … a veined, scrawny, dribbling … bone clock, whose face betrays how very, very little time they have left.”