Nova Swing Quotes

“Perception of a state is not the state.”
― M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

“When I was little, she thought, I wanted nothing except to stop travelling. I wanted time for each new thing, each new feeling, to be held properly in suspension until it could be joined by the next. Given the chance I could easily hold all those beautiful things together. I could be like a box in which they would be held new forever. Instead, everything aged and changed. People too.”
― M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

“It's 2444. We're all someone.”
― M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

“Adstreams floated everywhere, their unbearable lightness of being -- their simple promise -- catching you up: until the crown of butterflies round your head morphed into a crown of thorns and you found you had surrendered your intimate data to some twink-farmer forty blocks away on Pierpoint Street.”
― M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

“This was how life went. A single moment seemed to extend forever, then suddenly you were snapped out of it. The forward motion of time stretched whatever rubbery glue-like substance had fixed you there until it failed catastrophically. You weren’t the person you were before you got trapped; you weren’t the person you were while you were trapped: the merciless thing about it, Liv discovered, was that you weren’t someone entirely different either.”
― M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

“All crimes,” she remembered him advising, “are crimes against continuity—continuity of life, continuity of ownership, systems continuity.”
― M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

“None of us is anyone any more. We all lost who we were. But we can all be something else, and I will be so happy to fly this rocket anywhere you suggest, even though you and Irene called it Nova Swing, which is the cheapest name I ever heard.”
― M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

“The first time you came into my bar I saw that though you had been a pilot all your life, piloting was over for you.”
― M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

“her eyes looked as bruised as if their life together had already occurred”
― M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

“You spent five years in a research tub at Radio RX-1 with the Kefahuchi Tract hanging over your shoulder like a huge boiling face, stripped, raw, heaving with some emotion you couldn't recognise. It's been fun,. It's been heartbreak all the way. It's never been less than a trip.”
― M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

“It's only music, though" she said.
"Perhaps," Aschemann agreed. For the detective, he thought, nothing is ever only itself.”
― M. John Harrison, Nova Swing