Viriconium Quotes

“Instead, as the crystal splinters entered Hornwrack's brain, he experienced two curious dreams of the Low City, coming so quickly one after the other that they seemed simultaneous. In the first, long shadows moved across the ceiling frescoes of the Bistro Californium, beneath which Lord Mooncarrot's clique awaited his return to make a fourth at dice. Footsteps sounded on the threshold. The women hooded their eyes and smiled, or else stifled a yawn, raising dove-grey gloves to their blue, phthisic lips. Viriconium, with all her narcissistic intimacies and equivocal invitations welcomed him again. He had hated that city, yet now it was his past and it was he had to regret...The second of these visions was of the Rue Sepile. It was dawn, in summer. Horse-chestnut flowers bobbed like white wax candles above the deserted pavements. An oblique light struck into the street - so that its long and normally profitless perspective seemed to lead straight into the heart of a younger, more ingenuous city - and fell across the fronts of the houses where he had once lived, warming up the rotten brick and imparting to it a not unpleasant pinkish colour. Up at the second-floor casement window a boy was busy with the bright red geraniums arranged along the outer still in lumpen terra-cotta pots. He looked down at Hornwrack and smiled. Before Hornwrack could speak he drew down the lower casement and turned away. The glass which no separated them reflected the morning sunlight in a silent explosion; and Hornwrack, dazzled mistaking the light for the smile, suddenly imagined an incandescence which would melt all those old streets!

Rue Sepile; the Avenue of Children; Margery Fry Court: all melted down! All the shabby dependencies of the Plaza of Unrealized Time! All slumped, sank into themselves, eroded away until nothing was left in his field of vision but an unbearable white sky above and the bright clustered points of the chestnut leaves below - and then only a depthless opacity, behind which he could detect the beat of his own blood, the vitreous humour of the eye. He imagined the old encrusted brick flowing, the glass cracking and melting from its frames even as they shrivelled awake, the sheds of paints flaring green and gold, the geraniums toppling in flames to nothing, not even white ash, under this weight of light! All had winked away like reflections in a jar of water glass, and only the medium remained, bright, viscid, vacant. He had a sense of the intolerable briefness of matter, its desperate signalling and touching, its fall; and simultaneously one of its unendurable durability

He thought, Something lies behind all the realities of the universe and is replacing them here, something less solid and more permanent. Then the world stopped haunting him forever.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“As they moved from exhibit to exhibit like reluctant tourists in some artist's studio, Buffin sat on a stool with his limbs tense. He was like an exhibit himself in the direct odd light filtering through the whitish panes, legs wound tensely round one another, his face like an apologetic bag.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“tegeus-Cromis, sometime soldier and sophisticate, who now dwelt quite alone in a tower by the sea and imagined himself a better poet than swordsman.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“Viriconium, the Pastel City; a little cryptic, a little proud, a little mad. Its histories, as forgotten as his own, made of the air a sort of amber, an entrapment; the geometry of its avenues was a wry message from one survivor to another: and its present, like his own, was but an implication of its past - a dream, a prediction, a brief possibility to be endured.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“Go the window: the street is empty. You may hear running footsteps, or a sigh. In a minute or two the whistles have moved away in the direction of the Tinmarket or the Margarethestrasse. Next day some minor prince is discovered in the gutter with his throat cut, and all you are left with is the impression of secret wars, lethal patience, an intelligent manouevring in the dark.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“We waste our lives in half truths and nonsense. We waste them.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“Before I came to the city I cut off my hair. It was the first of many fatally symbolic gestures.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“He was, and always had been, the repository of more fears than hopes.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“Gdy to koty miały definiować świat, ważne miejsce zajmowałyby w nim pożerane dla zabawy muchy”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“one dawn following another until they made eighty years of wounds and fevers. None of it meant anything.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“Someone at least is keeping the night alive,” he observed.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“I cannot shake off a sense of foreboding.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“We value our suffering. It is intrinsic, purgative, and it enables us to perceive the universe directly. Moreover, it is a private thing which can neither be shared nor diminished by contact.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“A battle began in which the sole true flesh and blood at stake was mine, yet I looked on impotently, terrified.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“The corridors were as cold as an omen, haunted by an ancient grief.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“I feel my death in all this.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“For two days a scene from his previous life had hung at the outside edge of perception, giving him the impression that he was accompanied everywhere by one or two partly visible companions. They were tall and whitish—candle-like figures resembling the drawings of the insane—and whenever he turned his head they vanished immediately. At unexpected moments the scene would submerge him completely, and he would become aware that they were walking in some sort of sunken ornamental garden planted with flowers whose names he could not remember and filled with a smell of horsehair and mint which varied in intensity with the wind from beyond the walls. Across it floated the voices of his companions, engaged in some half-serious philosophical or religious dispute. His relationship to them, whilst not precisely sexual, could be described in only the most complex and emotional of terms, and his constant attempts to see them more clearly had given his head a slight sideways tilt, and lent to his expression an even more withdrawn quality than was usual.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“All night he had lain in a painful daze broken by short violent dreams and fevers in which he received hints and rumours of the world’s end.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“His queer green eyes were blank and unfocused, but with a psychic rather than a physical weariness.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“He was barefooted and dusty, bent as if from a long journey undertaken in haste and poverty, and his face was hidden in the depths of his hood.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“It is important to my nature,” he admitted, “that it remain a mystery to me.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“In coming here, we have killed more men than you have eaten hot meals, and many for less than that practical joke.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“Two days out into the barrens. It seemed longer. “The landscape is so static,” said Grif, “that Time is drawn out, and runs at a strange, slow speed.” “Scruffy metaphysics. You are simply dying of boredom. I think I am already dead.” Old Theomeris slapped his pony’s rump. “This is my punishment for an indiscreet life. I wish I had enjoyed it more.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“I wish I hadn’t come. I am an old man and deserve better.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“where the wind lamented considerably some gigantic sorrow it was unable to put into words.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“Cromis was a man who, like most recluses, thought he understood himself, and did not.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“She smiled, and the smile passed barriers he had not thought existed in his morose soul.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“I must always remember that Art is as important as Science, and contain my impatience!" (Emmet Buffo)”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“Out came the high-pitched voice of a poet, auctioning the dull things he had found in the back of his brain.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium

“Each species has its fiction, and that fiction is to all intents and purposes real; and the actual thin substance of the universe becomes more and more debatable”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium