The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

‘Look around. Walk. Find a cheap bed. Eat what the locals eat. Find a cheap beer. Try not to get fleeced. Talk. Pick up a few words in the local lingo. Just be there, y’know? Sometimes,’ Brubeck bites into an apple, ‘sometimes I want to be everywhere, all at once, so badly I could just …’ Brubeck mimes a bomb going off in his rib-cage. ‘Do you never get that feeling?’

‘Power is the ability to make someone do what they otherwise wouldn’t, or deter them from doing what they otherwise would.’

‘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. Power’s comings and goings, from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, diktat and accident of birth, are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.’

Power mocks all its illustrious favourites as they lie dying.

a blade of happiness slips between my ribs.

A youthful underling came in his place – the boy was virtually tripping over his umbilical cord.

if you could reason with religious people, there wouldn’t be any religious people.

There is no God but the one we dream up, I could assure my fellow parishioners: humanity is on its own and always was …