Central Station Quotes

“Space was full of questions, life was a sentence always ending in an ellipsis or a question mark. You couldn't answer everything. You could only believe there were answers at all.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“There comes a time in a man's life when he realises stories are lies. Things do not end neatly. The enforced narratives a human impinges on the chaotic mess that is life become empty labels”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“It is, perhaps, the prerogative of every man or woman to imagine, and thus force a shape, a meaning, onto that wild and meandering narrative of their lives, by choosing genre. A princess is rescued by a prince; a vampire stalks a victim in the dark; a student becomes a master. A circle is completed. An so on.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“Life wasn't like that neat classification system, Achimwene had come to realize. Life was half-completed plots abandoned, heroes dying halfway along their quests, loves requited and un-, some fading inexplicably, some burning short and bright.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“...these fragile, worn, faded, thin, cheap paper-bound books. They smelled of dust, and mould, and age. They smelled, faintly, of pee, and tobacco, and spilled coffee. They smelled like things which had lived.

They smelled like history.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“Family wasn't like that, not really. It was not something small and compact, a "nuclear family": it was a great big mess of people, all interlinked, cousins and aunts and relatives-by-marriage and otherwise -- it was a network, like the Conversation or a human brain. It was what he had tried to escape, going Up and Out, but you cannot run away from family, it follows you wherever you go.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“A group of disgruntled house appliances watched the sermon in the virtuality -- coffee makers, cooling units, a couple of toilets -- appliances, more than anyone else, needed the robots' guidance, yet they were often wilful, bitter, prone to petty arguments, both with their owners and with themselves.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“Then feed, the voice said, and something vast and inhuman, a body like a whale's, pressed against her, near suffocating her, and she held close to it, its rubbery body, its smell of brine and seaweed, the skin rough to the touch, her nose pressed against this huge belly, her mouth watering, her canines slipping out, sinking into the rubbery flesh of it, feeding, feeding on this enormity, this alien entity, too vast and powerful to comprehend, the feed overwhelming her, suffocating her, and in her mind that voice, chuckling as it faded, saying, Why do humans always make the comparison to whales?”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“Nigdy z niej nie zrezygnował. Nigdy jej nie zdradził.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“But he knew, too, that there is more than one story in this world at a time; and that her story was not his.
Their stories had entwined, but they had different trajectories, different conclusions. He could only hope the two stories would not separate. It was a strange sort of realisation: that he loved her.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“Family wasn't like that, not really. It was not something small and compact, a "nuclear family": it was a great big mess of people, all interlinked, cousins and aunts and relatives-by-marriage and otherwise--it was a network, like the Conversation or a human brain. It was what he had tried to escape, going into the Up and Out, but you cannot run away from family, it follows you, wherever you go.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“But he knew, too, that there is more than one in story in the world at a time; and that her story was not his. Their stories had entwined, but they had different trajectories, different conclusions.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“Stories gave shape to Achimwene's life. Narratives gave a series of random events meaning. And so he shaped this, too, as a story.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“Other humans believed the same way they breathed: it came natural to them. The world was filled with synagogues and churches, mosques and temples, shrines to Elron and Ogko. New faiths rose and fell like breath. They bred like flies. They died like species.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station

“Or perhaps it was curiosity that motivated them after all, that earliest of motives, the most human and the most suspect, the one that had led Adam to the Tree, in the dawn of Story.”
― Lavie Tidhar, Central Station