The Mars House Quotes

“They talk to everyone. Even Kasha.” “About Ancient Chinese verbs, Max,” Aubrey said, exasperated. “That’s the opposite of social skills, that’s projectile autism.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“What filled his head was how bad he was at all this. He hated being flirted with but he fell in love all the time, and never with people who loved him back—generally the ones who would never have dreamed of flirting with him. He was like one of those cats that only wanted to be stroked by people who were allergic to cats.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“Watch for kids,” they said. “Their filters are better than ours. Adults aren’t allowed to shift too far away from how they really look, it gives you virtual dissonance syndrome, but five-year-old me went round as a tiny fluffy dinosaur for a while.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“If you were hurt in a straightforward, ordinary way, people felt sympathetic, helped, and that was that. But there was a tipping point. There was a difference between breaking your wrist and horrifying necrosis. If it was bad enough, that instinct to help vanished, because there was no helping. What was left was the instinct to hit you with a rock.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“This is . . . why English has two or three words for everything,” Gale said, as though they were worried January might feel the shoelace urge too. “You get yourself a drink, but a flight attendant offers you a beverage menu. Drink is German, but beverage is French; more formal. Half of English comes in pairs or triplets with the same meaning but different levels of formality.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“you could never go as high alone. Nowhere near as high.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“She was smaller than January, and she barely reached Gale’s ribs. She stared, and then she did the most human thing he’d seen any politician do: she burst into tears, and sank down onto the ground. January knelt beside her, wishing he knew what to say, because he knew exactly how she felt. It was joy for having arrived, and sorrow for having left, and fear and hopelessness, to be confronted with a human being who was just so utterly different there was no way to even pretend this was home.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“it made January angry too, when people declared that giving someone poor some basic human consideration was the same as being Stalin.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“finance people fidgeted with their tablets and said, well, this is what governments do when they want to privatise a beloved national resource: they make it terrible until the voters ask them to get rid of it. Probably the Consul wants to sell Songshu—probably to Beijing.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“If he were living in one of those parts of Earth where women had fewer rights than guns and anyone like Gale who didn’t do the whole “he” and “she” business was likely to end up in a mental hospital, he would sure as hell have wanted to stamp that off the face of the planet, because anything would have been better.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“It’s when marriage was reduced to a five-year contract rather than a permanent arrangement. The cases trail off within a generation.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“Ariel was beginning to conclude that an important part of understanding the human experience was understanding the total human servitude to cats.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“It’s called the illusory truth effect. If you hear something often enough, for long enough, you’ll believe it. Even if you originally knew that the information was false,”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“when people declared that giving someone poor some basic human consideration was the same as being Stalin. It was the kind of argument deployed by people who were saving up for their own private golf course.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House

“The simple, stupid truth was that all he wanted to do was go where there was food and heat. He was aching less with hunger than a kind of shock that it was so easy for everything to just collapse, for life to go from boring visits to the café and wondering if it was extravagant to get hot chocolate instead of coffee, to—this.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Mars House