The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

‘My uncle Norm says religion’s “spiritual paracetamol”,

But if you’re sat on this wall tonight just because your umbilical cord got snipped, then, yeah, it hurts, but it had to happen. Cut your mum a bit of slack.

I s’pose if some man’s been inside you often enough, it’ll take a while to get rid of him.

‘The lie that happiness is about borrowing money you haven’t got to buy crap you don’t need,’

Being born’s a hell of a lottery.

For girls – me, anyway – sex is what you do on page one to get to the love that’s later on in the book.

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

‘Life has this mortality clause written into it. We all have to die one day. But in the meantime, doing unto others is a damn sight more attractive than being done to by others.’

Cambridge is full of insiders’ words to keep outsiders out.

Sex may be the antidote to death but it offers life everlasting only to the species, not the individual.

Here’s the truth: who is spared love is spared grief.

Life is a terminal illness.

‘You only value something if you know it’ll end.’

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

But I know that, after a couple of months, a well-ordered life tastes like a flat, non-alcoholic lager.

Thinking, When I get back home, I’ll never leave again. Thinking, When I get back home, I’ll never feel this alive.

One moment you’re carrying this lovable little tyke on your shoulders, the next she’s off, and you realise what you suspected all along: however much you love them, your children are only ever on loan.’

the dingy bar that served as common room, rumour mill and favour exchange.

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

‘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?’

Men marry women hoping they’ll never change. Women marry men hoping they will.

and asks me whether I believe in the soul, and if so, what the soul may be. I riff on notions of the soul as a karmic report card; as a spiritual memory-stick in search of a corporeal hard-drive; and as a placebo we generate to cure our dread of mortality.

‘That’s why Australia and New Zealand’re, like, invasion-proof. Any foreign army’d only get halfway up the beach before the time difference’d kick in, and they’d just like whoa, and collapse in the sand and that’d be it, invasion over.

This is what we’ve fought, connived, plotted and prayed for, and yet, and yet, my joy’s melting away even as I touch it.

‘That’s the trouble. All that beauty: in-sodding-sufferable. Ewan Rice calls Venice the Capital of Divorce – and set one of his best books there. About divorce. Venice is humanity at its ripped-off, ripping-off worst … I made this smart-arse remark about a rip-off umbrella Carmen bought – really, the sort of thing I say twenty times a day – but instead of batting it away, she had this look … like, “Remind me, why am I spending the last of my youth on this whingeing old man?” She walked off across St Mark’s Square. Alone, of course.’

Taste being the blood of memory,

‘Precognition comes and goes,’ I snow-plough up some spilt sugar granules with my little finger, ‘mysteriously, like allergies or warts.’