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In haste, I bade Henry Goose a good day. I fancy he is a Bedlamite.
Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.
Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you, Hurrah, you rolling river. Oh, Shenandoah, I’ll not deceive you, We’re bound way ’cross the wide Missouri. Oh, Shenandoah, I love your daughter, I love the place across the water. The ship sails free, the wind is blowing, The braces taut, the sheets a-flowing. Missouri, she’s a mighty river, We’ll brace her up till her topsails shiver. Oh, Shenandoah, I’ll leave you never, Till the day I die, I’ll love you ever
Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction,
An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton.
From what little I can glean, it’s the edited journal of a voyage from Sydney to California by a notary of San Francisco named Adam Ewing.
Something shifty about the journal’s authenticity—seems too structured for a genuine diary, and its language doesn’t ring quite true—but who would bother forging such a journal, and why?
A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.
“I dreamt of a…nightmarish café, brilliantly lit, but underground, with no way out. I’d been dead a long, long time. The waitresses all had the same face. The food was soap, the only drink was cups of lather. The music in the café was”—he wagged an exhausted finger at the MS—“this.”
One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.
“Do you know?” he says. “I feel I’ve known you for years, not ninety minutes.”
He witnesses himself through Robert’s words searching Bruges for his unstable friend, first love, and if I’m honest, my last.
“Cloud Atlas Sextet…Robert Frobisher…As a matter of fact I have heard of it,
Four hundred vainglorious pages expire in an ending flat and inane quite beyond belief.’ ”
Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.
I am Mrs. Noakes. You do not wish to cross me.”
Was this some sort of a kinky S & M hotel?
“Soylent Green is people!” I mocked their hollow stares, “Soylent Green is made of people!”
Later, we saw smiling Sonmis, Yoonas, Ma-Leu-Das, and Hwa-Soons on 3-D as they embarked for Hawaii, arrived at Xultation, and finally were transformed into consumers with Soulrings.
However, I believe that ascension merely frees what Soap represses, including the xpression of an innate personality possessed by all fabricants.
Popular wisdom has it that fabricants don’t have personalities. This fallacy is propagated for the comfort of purebloods.
even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes.
Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively.
“We are just slaves here for twelve years.”
An’ you too you got to mem’ry these augurin’s well ’cos they’ll change the path o’ this yarnin’ more’n once. One: Hands are burnin’, let that rope be not cut. Two: Enemy’s sleeping, let his throat be not slit. Three: Bronze is burnin’, let that bridge be not crossed.
her fate’n’mine was binded t’gether like twines o’ vine-cord.
The Prescient answered, Old Uns tripped their own Fall.
Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ’morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.
he even b’liefed Meronym the Prescient was his presh b’loved Sonmi, yay, he ’sisted it, he said he knowed it all by birthmarks an’ comets’n’all.
The final drop shook free an earlier memory of blackness, inertia, gravity, of being trapped in another ford. Where was it? Who was it?
The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane.
Being Nurse Noakes’s sheepdog was her and Warlock-Williams’s survival niche. I thought of Primo Levi’s Drowned and the Saved.
One or two things will have to go: the insinuation that Luisa Rey is this Robert Frobisher chap reincarnated, for example. Far too hippie-druggy–new age. (I, too, have a birthmark, below my left armpit, but no lover ever compared it to a comet. Georgette nicknamed it Timbo’s Turd.)
Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured.
“Witty homily, that.” My sarcasm disgusted me. “You must be a genius in Scotland.” “No, in Scotland a genius is an Englishman who gets himself accidentally imprisoned in a retirement home.”
What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.
Power seeks + is the right to “landscape” the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune)
Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone.
The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts. Now the bifurcation of these two pasts will begin.
“Catch you all next time.” Luisa is going. “It’s a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.”
Cape Yerbas Marina Royale Proud Home of the Prophetess Best-Preserved Schooner in the World!
Never met a quack whom I didn’t half-suspect of plotting to do me in as expensively as he could contrive.
“To those upon the menu, the sauce is no concern.”
“sextet for overlapping soloists”:
each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order.
It is the book itself
A blue vein throbbed over Ayrs’s Adam’s apple, and I fought off an unaccountably strong urge to open it up with my penknife. Most uncanny. Not quite déjà vu, more jamais vu.
Well, Adam, even friends are made of meat.
In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.
He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!” Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?
Novels are holidays from the self. Novels encourage second thoughts, and third thoughts. Novels allow us to walk a mile in the shoes of the other.
