Other Worlds Than These Quotes

“The lesson you receive from The Chronicles of Narnia is that reality is not where it’s at, my friend, so get out by any point of egress you can find and get into somewhere better.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“Jeremy Mars knows a lot about the planet Mars, although he’s never been there. He knows some girls, and yet he doesn’t know much about them. He wishes there were books about girls, the way there are books about Mars, that you could observe the orbits and brightness of girls through telescopes without appearing to be perverted. Once Jeremy read a book about Mars out loud to Karl, except he kept replacing the word Mars with the word “girls.” Karl cracked up every time.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“But it’s hard to keep your guard up at all times. Jeremy comes home from school, feeling as if he has passed the math test after all. Jeremy is an optimist. Maybe there’s something good on TV. He settles down with the remote control on one of his father’s pet couches: oversized and reupholstered in an orange-juice-colored corduroy that makes it appear as if the couch has just escaped from a maximum security prison for criminally insane furniture. This couch looks as if its hobby is devouring interior decorators. Jeremy’s father is a horror writer, so no one should be surprised if some of the couches he reupholsters are hideous and eldritch.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“Ana thought eyebrow rings were stupid. She liked earrings, and she could understand nose rings, belly-button rings and even pierced tongues, but metal sticking out of random facial places like eyebrows just looked to her like shrapnel from a booby-trapped jewelry box. She didn’t like it. The fact that Garth’s eyebrow was obviously infected proved that she was right, and that the universe didn’t like it either.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“We’ve all been through it. It’s a life stage. Well, all except John the Idiot, and he’d welcome the chance for an agonising divorce.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“Las Vegas is in front of them and then all around them and everything is lit up like they’re inside a pinball game. All of the trees look fake. Like someone read too much Dr. Seuss and got ideas. People are walking up and down the sidewalks. Some of them look normal. Others look like they just escaped from a fancy-dress ball at a lunatic asylum. Jeremy hopes they’ve just won lots of money and that’s why they look so startled, so strange. Or maybe they’re all vampires.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“You’d have to be naked if you were invisible,” Karl says. “Because otherwise people would see your clothes.” “If you could fly, you’d have to wear thermal underwear because it’s cold up there. So it just depends on whether you like to wear long underwear or no underwear at all,” Amy says.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“Funny, Germ. We should have a surprise party for you before you go,” Elizabeth said. “It won’t be a surprise party now,” Jeremy said. Maybe kissing him once was enough. “Well, once I tell Amy it can’t really be a surprise party,” Elizabeth said. “She would explode into a million pieces and all the little pieces would start yelling, ‘Guess what? Guess what? We’re having a surprise party for you, Jeremy!”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“Jeremy’s mother doesn’t read horror novels. She doesn’t like ghost stories or unexplained phenomena or even the kind of phenomena that require excessively technical explanations. For example: microwaves, airplanes. She doesn’t like Halloween, not even Halloween candy. Jeremy’s father gives her special editions of his novels, where the scary pages have been glued together.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“Jeremy’s mother doesn’t read horror novels. She doesn’t like ghost stories or unexplained phenomena or even the kind of phenomena that require excessively technical explanations. For example: microwaves, airplanes.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“Talis’s father has a karaoke machine in his basement, and he knows all the lyrics to “Like a Virgin” and “Holiday” as well as the lyrics to all the songs from Godspell and Cabaret. Talis’s mother is a licensed therapist who composes multiple-choice personality tests for women’s magazines. “Discover Which Television Character You Resemble Most.” Etc. Amy’s parents met in a commune in Ithaca: her name was Galadriel Moon Shuyler before her parents came to their senses and had it changed legally. Everyone is sworn to secrecy about this, which is ironic, considering that this is Amy.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“Elizabeth comes up behind Talis. If Talis is unGoth, then Elizabeth is Ballerina Goth. She likes hearts and skulls and black pen-ink tattoos, pink tulle, and Hello Kitty. When the woman who invented Hello Kitty was asked why Hello Kitty was so popular, she said, “Because she has no mouth.” Elizabeth’s mouth is small. Her lips are chapped.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“She’s wearing a T-shirt that says I’m So Goth I Shit Tiny Vampires. “Hey,” Jeremy says. Talis nods. Talis isn’t so Goth, at least not as far as Jeremy or anyone else knows. Talis just has a lot of T-shirts. She’s an enigma wrapped in a mysterious T-shirt. A woman once said to Calvin Coolidge, “Mr. President, I bet my husband that I could get you to say more than two words.” Coolidge said, “You lose.” Jeremy can imagine Talis as Calvin Coolidge in a former life. Or maybe she was one of those dogs that don’t bark. A basenji. Or a rock. A dolmen. There was an episode of The Library, once, with some sinister dancing dolmens in it.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“She’s wearing a T-shirt that says I’m So Goth I Shit Tiny Vampires.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“Jeremy has wondered about what kind of television shows the characters in television shows watch. Television characters almost always have better haircuts, funnier friends, simpler attitudes toward sex. They marry magicians, win lotteries, have affairs with women who carry guns in their purses. Curious things happen to them on an hourly basis. Jeremy and I can forgive their haircuts. We just want to ask them about their television shows.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“Jeremy comes home from school, feeling as if he has passed the math test after all. Jeremy is an optimist. Maybe there’s something good on TV. He settles down with the remote control on one of his father’s pet couches: oversized and reupholstered in an orange-juice-colored corduroy that makes it appear as if the couch has just escaped from a maximum security prison for criminally insane furniture. This couch looks as if its hobby is devouring interior decorators. Jeremy’s father is a horror writer, so no one should be surprised if some of the couches he reupholsters are hideous and eldritch.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS KELLY LINK”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“She wanted to know what connected the universes, she wanted to step back from it all and see the kalpa-vriksh in its entirety. But she was caught in it as surely as anyone else. A participant-observer who must deduce the grand structure of the cosmic tree from within it, who must work at it while being caught in it, a worm in a twig, a fly in amber, to feel the knowing, the learning, like a new intimacy, a love.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“With second chances, third chances, hundredth chances, millionth chances,” Pasco corrected her. “All the chances you want. But not a second chance to have a first chance.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“How’s the novel?” she asked Bertha. This was the usual thing to ask. Bertha had always been writing a novel. “Terrible,” Bertha said. “Sorry,” said Ana. She wondered if it was better to be a novelist or a traveling actor, and decided it would still be better to be a pirate king.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“Town isn’t big enough for gangs,” she said. “Doesn’t matter anyway. This is just somebody marking their territory. This is colored piss with artistic pretensions.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“Ana thought eyebrow rings were stupid. She liked earrings, and she could understand nose rings, belly-button rings and even pierced tongues, but metal sticking out of random facial places like eyebrows just looked to her like shrapnel from a booby-trapped jewelry box.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“She knew where to find the gym because it doubled as a theater, and last summer a troupe of traveling actors had put on The Pirates of Penzance. After the show Ana had decided to become a traveling actor. Then she decided that what she really wanted to be was a pirate king.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“He takes a halting step forward. The dust seems to crunch beneath his feet, like a covering of snow: there is a firm footing beneath a soft, resilient layer a few inches thick. His footprints are miraculously sharp, as if he’s placed his ridged overshoes in fine, damp sand. He takes a photograph of one particularly well-defined print; it will persist here for millions of years, he realises, like the fossilised footprint of a dinosaur, to be eroded away only by the slow rain of micrometeorites, that echo of the titanic bombardments of the deep past. He”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“I don’t necessarily wish I was where they are...but I still wish I was a smoking man.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“can only complain satisfactorily to people you know really well”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“I studied film history at Colombia”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“It’s best if you don’t think about that part.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These

“Traveling to the past inside one’s home universe is impossible. Traveling to a precise multiverse spacetime coordinate inside an adjacent reality is possible, if you possess a Device. Their inventor remains unknown. The trip utterly destroys every atom in your body, but a new copy of you arrives safely on the other side. It’s best if you don’t think about that part.”
― John Joseph Adams, Other Worlds Than These