Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.

What value are education, breeding, and talent if one doesn’t have a pot to piss in?

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

That love loves fidelity, she riposted, is a myth woven by men from their insecurities.

Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I’ve stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.

How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false.

Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.”

“Power. What do we mean? ‘The ability to determine another man’s luck.’

“I want you to evolve problem-solving intelligence and sell me a ticket to Hull!”

but no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.

conduct your life in such a way that, when your train breaks down in the eve of your years, you have a warm, dry car driven by a loved one—or a hired one, it matters not—to take you home.

‘Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.’ ”

Truth is singular. Its “versions” are mistruths.

To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically.

A dinery server behaving like a pureblood attracts trouble; trouble attracts blame; blame demands a scapegoat.

Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively.

“What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?”

In Papa Song’s I had been a slave; at Taemosan I was a more privileged slave.

I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o’ that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. 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.

That such an insignificant-looking dot can confer all the rights of consumerdom on its bearers yet condemn the rest of corpocracy to servitude seemed, and seems still, a bizarre obscenity to me.

All rising suns set, Archivist. Our corpocracy now smells of senility.

All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she xtemporized, corpocracy would be finished.

The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane.

Rights are susceptible to subversion, as even granite is susceptible to erosion.

in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only “rights,” the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.