The Book of Elsewhere Quotes

“The great, great run of us, in the tales told by winds and mountains and trees and cities and the sea and Leviathan and the abyss and by him, my erstwhile master then companion, of whom we spoke, are full stops. We are what happens in the infinitely small instance between one moment worthy of remark and another. We are specks. Milliards of us contained within each such tiny beady ink eye.

But I believe, and I hope it is not the arrogance of love that befuddles me because I do not say I loved him and I know he never loved me, but I believe that were he ever to speak of me, if he were to write the great book of his own life, when it came to the few years I was at his side, that he, for the curl of a moment, as if raising a finger, would pause as if for breath.

That I am one of the elect, privileged forever to be a comma.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“I have always used writing to learn what it is that I think. And I find myself disinclined to leave these mysteries unexamined. I would like to know what I think about this.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“Death is quiet. It is the first quiet, and it will be the last.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“But data are rarely adequate to change one’s ideas. What is needed is a shock, a crisis all one’s own.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“There is unique pathos to the grief of the stoic.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“I told you,” he had said. “I don’t want to die. What I want is mortality, and that’s not the same thing.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“Once you spent three lifetimes sitting without moving on a stone chair halfway up a mountain, to see what would happen. Nothing happened.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“You’re experiencing a very particular coagulation of love, loss, and anger.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“That no memory is an exact recording. That to remember what you did cannot tell you why you did it.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“What I have found,” he said, “is that most journeys take you back to where you left from. But not all. A very long time ago I learned that at the end of some journeys, you start again somewhere new. They don’t happen very often. Such journeys as those. So when they do, it’s worth taking note.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“But I believe, and I hope it is not the arrogance of love that befuddles me because I do not say I loved him and I know he never loved me, but I believe that were he ever to speak of me, if he were to write the great book of his own life, when it came to the few years I was at his side, that he, for the curl of a moment, as if raising a finger, would pause as if for breath. That I am one of the elect, privileged forever to be a comma.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“You’re wrong.” Diana waited a beat. “I combine question marks and exclamations into interrobangs. They’re more efficient.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“Or Eames to Herman Miller,”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“Are these Eames chairs?” she said. “Yeah,” Unute said. “They’re 117s. I like the armrests. I always found Aerons overrated.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“some people who hated me said I was death, and that the god of life was on their side, and wanted to kill me. I always wanted to say, Why the fuck would you think life would give a fuck about you?”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“It’s our society that’s addicted. To negativity. I don’t mean this in a power-of-positive-thinking way, not that I have any problem with thinking positively. But that’s become kind of meaningless, these days. If you really start to think about what it is to think positively, it’s a lot more effort, and a lot less cozy, than that cliché makes it sound. It’s tough. And that’s right, it should be. Because we have to break an addiction. Our culture is addicted to negativity, and that means being addicted to death. It’s a death culture. That’s what we have to break.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“All of us may believe, or wish to, that our lives are tales that demand words aplenty for the telling. This is foolish and wicked pride: the age of prophets, of tales worth telling, is over.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“The brew opened the doors of the storm and I went to a blue place, to where the storm lives, or the storm came through or we met on the threshold, and I fucked the lightning, and the next day my tummy was big, and we called you the Impatient Boy. Two moons later out you came. So my father is not my father? you said. Hush, silly, she said. Your father is your father, he’s your dayfather, and the blue lightning is your nightfather.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“First, she said, there was Nothing. All at rest. Then came Something, to shake the Nothing out of its peace. Out of Something came Things in proliferation, noise and edges and motion, darkness and light and gloaming, rocks and stars and water and fire and cold. Out of them came muck and slime. Out of that came darting specks. Out of them after a while came trees and birds and us.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“They’d rather have rules I don’t care about,” B said, “and that I break, than not have them at all. Insubordination’s a lesser evil than independence, I guess.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“Everything means something else, it is true, but sometimes it also means precisely itself. Please listen to me. I am here to ask you, Why? What am I?”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“And if the earthly no longer knows your name, whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing. To the flashing water say: I am. —Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell)”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“I am a lightning child, you do not say, like the pig, and we are tools, and only broken tools know they are tools.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“Death not as destination but as horizon. Not death up close. His desire not for the end but to continue not-ending in a quite new way. In the shadow of life’s culminating end. And if that was what he craved, wasn’t that, though he hadn’t said this to her either, to suggest that he was not, now, living? What could it be, to exist with the banality of endlessness?”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“Goetic magic? The Abramelin?” She kept her voice neutral. “Some stuff from the Schemhamphorash, I think, and Le Dragon Rouge. I know, it’s a long shot.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“Well, you think, you have the answers to everything right here. But how do you even know where to start? How do you know what questions to spend your time on, when every sliver of information, every history-shattering revelation he drops over vending-machine coffee or idly while you draw his blood, throws up its own infinite library of further questions?”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“Diana Ahuja had dutifully read Sontag; she had a Tom of Finland coffee-table book; she’d shaken her stuff to the Village People now and then: it was hardly a revelation to her that the machismo of the military was camp.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“The ends," Diana said, "never justify the means."

"Oh, baloney," the woman said. "Sure they do. If I knew, if I was absolutely sure, that his methods would work, then I'd never have left. But they won't. I don't believe they can. And it's one thing to be the necessary evil. But if it's not necessary, or even if it is necessary but it's not also sufficient, then it's just evil. And that I won't do. Not even for this.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

“And now what?” B said. Keever pursed his lips. “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought maybe you could use some company.” B pursed his lips too. “I don’t know if I can,” he said. “Use it.”
― Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere