All That Is Solid Melts Into Air Quotes

“It's the same sky we've always live under. It's just in a different mood.”
― Darragh McKeon, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

“And she took this card five days a week, for the past three years. Punching in and out, marking her time.

Maria worked into the work, eventually finding comfort in camshafts. It had taken months for this to manifest itself--it was endless and repetitive and crushingly dull--but after a time the religious beauty of the task emerged. The detail, the exactitude required in working the lathe. How deep can an action go? How perfect can a human act be? Maria worked to a precision of thousandth of a millimeter. A micron, they called it. A micron.
And the repetition. And the repetition. And the repetition.”
― Darragh McKeon, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

“Grigory understands the power of the unspoken. To progress is to become fluent in the language. His rise in stature increased its pace when Grigory noticed that people in positions of power could hold almost an entire conversation with only a few simple words. He gained influence by understanding what his older, more junior colleagues did not: that power lurks in silences, in whispered conversations in the corner of a room, in contained gestures: a dip of the head, a pat of the forearm. It has often struck him that the most powerful men he has met also have the greatest range of physical articulations, a vital ability in a sphere where a misinterpreted comment can end even the most celebrated of careers.”
― Darragh McKeon, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

“The past demands fidelity,” she says. “I often think it’s the only thing that truly belongs to us.”
― Darragh McKeon, All That Is Solid Melts into Air

“Radiation is the ultimate assassin. Silent, invisible, tasteless, formless, odourless. It eviscerates the human body, devising sadistically imaginative forms of suffering. And it will keep on doing so for as long as we inhabit the earth. And we create it to boil water.”
― Darragh McKeon, All That Is Solid Melts into Air

“He looked out at these people wading through filth, letting out a bleat of delight if they salvaged something they could sell, finding small traces of encouragement buried in all the desolation, their comrades running towards them to share in the excitement.
And Artyom would return frequently to this moment in the following weeks, when he watched sickness engulf his father, when blood seeped out through the pores of his father’s skin, when he began to realize that he could never understand or predict the pathways that someone’s life could take; that the will of a desperate person was stronger than anything he knew and that fate unspools in its own stubborn way, beyond influence or rationale.”
― Darragh McKeon, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

“Grigory wraps plaster of Paris around its pelvis, dipping the swatches in the bowl of water before he does so, then has Artyom help him fold the dog’s legs into its body, so it can drag itself along while it recovers. They both take pleasure in their actions: healing something that contains no mystery; a broken bone that will be fixed, that is definable, a medical problem that has a resolution.”
― Darragh McKeon, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

“He saw the origins of illness. And in many cases he saw family here too, the hereditary nature of these conditions bearing a whisper of those who had gone before. History and family carrying on into the present, into the future, and he never failed to be fascinated, to reflect that our upbringing is apparent not just in our manners or mannerisms or speech, it is there too on a cellular level, proving its presence on an acetate sheet, aid against a lightbox, fifty years after our birth.”
― Darragh McKeon, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

“music is a demanding mistress.”
― Darragh McKeon, All That Is Solid Melts into Air

“Do you think you would have led the life you did if we had no books?”
― Darragh McKeon, All That Is Solid Melts into Air

“when he began to realize that he could never understand or predict the pathways that someone’s life could take; that the will of a desperate person was stronger than anything he knew and that fate unspools in its own stubborn way, beyond influence or rationale.”
― Darragh McKeon, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

“By 2004, morbidity rates among Ukrainian adults and teenagers in heavily contaminated areas was 573 per 1,000.* By 2011, only 5 to 10 percent of children in these regions were considered to be healthy.”
― Darragh McKeon, All That Is Solid Melts into Air

“Licensing a nuclear power plant is in my view, licensing random premeditated murder. . . . It is not a question any more: radiation produces cancer, and the evidence is good all the way down to the lowest doses.*”
― Darragh McKeon, All That Is Solid Melts into Air