The Ministry of Time Quotes

“Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“If you ever fall in love, you’ll be a person who was in love for the rest of your life.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“I know how much you've longed for your future to lean down and cup your face, to whisper 'don't worry, it gets better'. The truth is, it wont get better if you keep making the same mistakes. It can get better, but you must allow yourself to imagine a world in which you are better.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. I only do because I can see how wrong my choices were. Don’t do it like this. Don’t enter believing yourself a node in a grand undertaking, that your past and your trauma will define your future, that individuals don’t matter. The most radical thing I ever did was love him, and I wasn’t even the first person in this story to do that. But you can get it right, if you try. You will have hope, and you have been forgiven. Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Life is a series of slamming doors. We make irrevocable decisions every day. A twelve-second delay, a slip of the tongue, and suddenly your life is on a new road.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“I let her leave without saying goodbye and sat in the pool of silence that followed the crash of the front door slamming shut. This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Belief has very little to do with rationale. Why demand a map for uncharted territory?”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up. It’s the same with oppression. You don’t gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaffolding of your oppression.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Everything that has ever been could have been prevented, and none of it was. The only thing you can mend is the future.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“I had always thought of joy as a shouting, flamboyant thing, that tossed breath into the sky like a ball. Instead it robbed me of my speech and my air. I was pinned in place by joy and I didn't know what to do.
"Come here," he said, and pulled me into his arms.
I pressed my face against his neck. My body sparked, and I couldn't move, except to lean into him. I was filled with happiness, so enormous and terrifying it was as if I'd committed a crime to get it. No one had given me permission to feel this way, and I thought I might not be allowed it. He combed his fingers though my hair and I was frightened with happiness, harrowed by it. There was no way that anyone could feel this much without also knowing they were going to lose it.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“All this unfolded in what I now know to call our last weeks. Within the action of this story, these memories mean little. After the first time Graham and I went to bed together, they are symbolically all of a piece. I could have written to you without including them; after all, the things that happen between lovers are lost to the work of history anyway. But I wrote it down because I need you to bear witness to it. He was here, by and with and in my body. He lives in me like trauma does. If you ever fall in love, you’ll be a person who was in love for the rest of your life.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Holding me in his arms, the way that poems hold clauses.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“he looked oddly formal, as if he was the sole person in serif font.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“You misunderstand how history works,” she said. “ History is not a series of cause and effects which may be changed… It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening.”

“History id what we need to happen. You talk about changing history, but you’re trying to change the future.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“What is a ‘feminist killjoy’?” “Er—” “Have they a base? Mayhap a uniform? If not, I will design it. Ah, you laugh! But would we not look well in thigh boots and tabards broidered with FEMINIST KILLJOY? It sends a sturdy message.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“An underrated symptom of inherited trauma is how socially awkward it is to live with.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“If you are surprised that, so soon after a secret agent tried to kill me, I was wondering whether the man with whom I’d had sex liked liked me, remember that being in love is a form of blunt-force trauma. I was concussed with love for him. I bent my head to the cudgel.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“I flexed my shoulder blades, forcing the tension out. He was an anachronism, a puzzle, a piss-take, a problem, but he was, above all things, a charming man. In every century, they make themselves at home.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“I had always thought of joy as a shouting, flamboyant thing, that tossed breath into the sky like a ball. Instead it robbed me of my speech and my air. I was pinned in place by joy and I didn’t know what to do.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“The most radical thing I ever did was love him”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“He was funny, that was the problem. Funny men are bad for the health.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“He smiled directly into my face for the first time, his dimples notched his cheeks like a pair of speech marks.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“This is how you change history. As far as you know—or as far as the you that is me knows—the time-door is broken. You may never receive this document, which tells you what you will become if you follow this version of yourself. But if this falls into your hands, then I want you to know how it happens, step by step, so that you can change it. I exist at the beginning and end of this account, which is a kind of time-travel, but I hope you’ll find a way to contain me. I know how much you’ve longed for your future to lean down and cup your face, to whisper “Don’t worry, it gets better.” The truth is, it won’t get better if you keep making the same mistakes. It can get better, but you must allow yourself to imagine a world in which you are better. I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. I only do because I can see how wrong my choices were. Don’t do it like this. Don’t enter believing yourself a node in a grand undertaking, that your past and your trauma will define your future, that individuals don’t matter. The most radical thing I ever did was love him, and I wasn’t even the first person in this story to do that. But you can get it right, if you try. You will have hope, and you have been forgiven. Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“We were told we were bringing the expats to safety. We refused to see the blood and hair on the floor of the madhouse.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“When something changes you constitutionally, you say: 'The earth moved.' But the earth stays the same. It's your relationship with the ground that shifts.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“There he is, there he is. I wish I could tell you how it felt to see him. He’d always lived inside me, years before I’d known him. I’d been trained to love him.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“The most difficult stories about the Khmer Rouge are the ones over which hover almost and maybe. She almost made it, but dysentery took her at the end. He is maybe buried in the mass grave at Choeung Ek, so we will pay our respects there. He almost walked all the way to Thailand, but the cadres found him in the forest. She maybe saw her infant son one last time before she was taken. Anne Spencer almost made it off those wards. After I read the email, an ancient and exuberant terror blazed through me. It was partly the terror that had grown in me alongside my very bones, knowing as I did that I only existed because my mother had outrun almost; I don’t know at what point you stop feeling the need to run, generation by generation, when you’re born after that. But it was also a wonderful, simple, human terror. The one where death brushes too close to you and you abruptly remember what an insane gift it is to be alive, and how much you’d like to stay alive even when death is laughing at your window, laughing in your mirror.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time