The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

Power is crack-cocaine for your ego and battery-acid for your soul.

if an atrocity isn’t written about, it stops existing when the last witnesses die.

dusk brings a Transylvanian urgency to get home and bar the door behind you.

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

books can talk but do not listen.

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

‘Sleep tight, Gran, don’t let the bedbugs bite.’ Dad used to say that to me, I used to say it to Aoife, Aoife passed it on to Lorelei, and now Lorelei says it back to me. We sort of live on, as long as there are people to live on in.

the comforting liars we voted into office – all so we didn’t have to change our cosy lifestyles.

You’re not a forgetter, you’re a survivor. I think it’s a miracle you remember anything at all.’

Few of us clocked on that ‘the natural order of things’ is entirely man-made, and that a world that kept expanding as technology regressed was not only possible but waiting in the wings.