Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence Quotes

“Your story can change. Overnight.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“In the beginning was the word. So what do you do when the words won’t come? When you don’t know what happens next? You just keep typing.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“She lost her fury. He’d had none. That’s how you win, in the end.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“Welcome to adulthood. Please leave your dreams at the door.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“You can’t have made-up things in made-up stories. But in real life, you can.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“Hell is not a place. It’s not a noun, child. It’s a verb.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“you have become all the things you have done and thought, and now can’t undo or unthink.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“Hannah's dad had a habit of never walking home the same way twice, with the intention of giving her a sense of how it all fitted together. What he'd actually achieved was to fail to provide a dependable route. As she stood confused on the corner, turning in a circle, it struck Hannah this happened all the time - grown-ups trying to teach you things in the wrong way, their way, that only made sense if you already knew what you were trying to learn.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“Never ask questions if you might not want to know the answers, lest you are pulled into those stories and the truths they reveal. Sometimes ignorance is better. It would probably not be so popular otherwise.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“In the story, an old man tells his grandson that he has a fight going on inside him, and has done his whole life. Between two wolves. One is a bad wolf –a wolf consumed with anger, regret, resentment and sorrow. The other wolf is good, with a heart filled with kindness, compassion and hope. Even joy. The boy asks which wolf will win in the end. The old man looks at him very seriously and says: “The one you feed.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“And so later Hannah was back at the kitchen table in her house. Sitting where she’d sat earlier. Her place. Hannah didn’t know that humankind has a deep-set belief in the idea that we create and maintain reality through ritual, that repeated actions are what keep the spheres in alignment. She also didn’t know that it doesn’t work, and that there are far older, more complex, and much darker designs in motion, ones that override ours as effortlessly as a crack of thunder blotting out birdsong.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“She didn’t know what made him happy, though … and she couldn’t remember him doing any of those things – laughing, smiling or being silly – for quite a while. From some time before Mom left, in fact. Was that why she’d gone? Because he hadn’t laughed any more? Would you leave someone because of something like that? Did you have to keep laughing and smiling and seeming happy or else people would leave you?”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“Humans and stories need each other. We tell them, but they tell us too – reaching with soft hands and wide arms to pull us into their embrace. They do this especially when we have become mired in lives of which we can make no sense. We all need a path, and stories can sometimes usher us back to it.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“Le père d’Hannah avait passé sa vie entière à éviter toute situation où une personne dotée d’un quelconque pouvoir officiel risquait de s’adresser à lui ou, à plus forte raison, de lui donner des ordres.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, La Vie ô combien ordinaire d'Hannah Green

“L’un des périls de l’âge adulte, c’est que ton esprit s’élargit bien au-delà de ce qui te concerne strictement. Il n’y a pas de cérémonie qui marque cette étape, pas d’avertissement. Ça t’arrive un jour, et brusquement, tu te rends compte qu’il se passe soixante-dix choses en même temps, et tu te recroquevilles au milieu d’un maelstrom fait d’amour, d’occasions manquées, de choix difficiles et des griffes tenaces du passé – sans compter qu’il faut, en plus, remettre de l’ordre dans le garage.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, La Vie ô combien ordinaire d'Hannah Green

“Cependant, toutes les histoires – je parle des vraies, hein, pas de celles où des ados à grande gueule se transforment en espions-ninjas, ou dont les protagonistes vieillissants renversent leur petite vie privilégiée sur un coup de tête et vont ouvrir une librairie d’occasion à Barcelone, où ils découvrent enfin l’amour – ont besoin de nous pour survivre. Les êtres humains sont les nuages d’où pleuvent les histoires, mais nous sommes également les éclats de verre qui en réfractent la lumière, qui en polarisent les rayons jusqu’à les rendre brûlants.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, La Vie ô combien ordinaire d'Hannah Green

“In the story, an old man tells his grandson that he has a fight going on inside him, and has done his whole life. Between two wolves. One is a bad wolf – a wolf consumed with anger, regret, resentment and sorrow. The other wolf is good, with a heart filled with kindness, compassion and hope. Even joy. The boy asks which wolf will win in the end. The old man looks at him very seriously and says: “The one you feed.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“The future is hungry and unkind. It’ll gobble you up, little girl. It will eat your heart.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“Almost every story in the world has a back door through which the Devil can enter if he so chooses.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“One of life’s dreariest truths, my dear, is that something once wonderful can come to seem … ordinary.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“We all serve the fates. Life will happen to us come what may. Not everyone gets to be a grandparent, but we're all someone's grandchild. We have no choice therefore but to carry someone else's weight, enacting their long-ago choices and duties of care. There's no point blaming others for what happens next, however: responsibility for shaping and unearthing our stories, following the bouncing squirrel of our destinies, lies with us alone. Our victories and losses, our gains and lacks, the challenges we decline and those we accept - all resonate through the generations that follow. ....Nothing ever ends, and no one truly dies.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“Well. it's all been extremely interesting,' Hannah declared, standing to leave. 'But if I'm honest, I'd prefer my life to be a lot more mundane from now on.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“I was a circumstance, Hannah, that's all. Good or bad - and I assure you that I remain extremely and appallingly bad - there are many angels because there were once many gods, pushing, pulling, hiding, guiding. Once we get through the fog and find a place that feels comfortable we look back and call their influence fate, and the destination our destiny. That's all.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“People stopped knowing how to behave, and most of all they stopped remembering why . They needed reasons to toe the line, and that was what they were given. Two reasons. Heaven, and Hell. Equal in resonance and moment. No one will ever be able to tell whether it has been the promise of Heaven or the threat of Hell that has kept this world from teetering into chaos ten thousand times. That is why Hell matters, and that's why the power of black deeds must always be directed there. Without evil there is no good, and without Hell's focusing lens there can be no true evil - just a great deal of extremely poor behaviour.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“ I hate you.
Parents hear those words more often than anyone, and always from those they love the most. Families are the crucibles that temper the toughest of love's swords. It gets intense in there sometimes. You know you're going to get slapped with those words sooner or later, when the little person in your charge glares hot-eyed up at you and flexes their soul. You'll joke about it with your partner before it happens, how someday this bundle of dependency will carve off sufficient autonomy to stab you with the cutting words. You figure it'll be in their teens, but in fact it starts a lot earlier. Kids are leaving you from the day they're born. They have their pens in their hands and start making marks on their own sheets of paper, their first words and sentences, their personal Chapter One. It's shocking to have those words hurled at you, but you come to take them for the spasm of frustration or low blood sugar they usually are.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“In your twenties you unquestioningly believe you're writing in pencil, a striking first draft. You do things with such confidence. You know you're so strong, so individual, wholly unique: that you have power over heaven and earth, and that the future and its wonders are either already in your hands or will be after you do the next thing, or the thing that follows naturally after that.
And so you bravely pick up the existential pencil and sketch a few opening sentences, the speculative first paragraph. You encourage the woman or man you love to write alongside you, relishing the co-authoring of this huge improvisational adventure, this big and beautiful game. You write and write and write and it all seems so very easy, and before you know it you're already on Chapter Sixteen and that's great because just look how much you've done, and how very good it is . . . or will be, definitely, when you've had a chance to give it an edit.
Until the lunch in Los Gatos when you realize there will be no second draft, that your wife doesn't love you any more, and you've been writing with indelible ink all along.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“Erik left the church and walked back out through the streets. The people coursing through them did not frighten him any more because he realized their movements and the sound of their thousand voices were notes in a vast piece of music, a story made of sounds, sometimes dissonant - like the shouts of men trying to sell bits of meat, or old, rusty tools - and at others sweet and pure, like mothers fondly calling their children, or greeting their neighbours. What he'd heard in the church, along with the realization that these things did not just come out of the mind of God, but could be born in the fingers of men, changed him forever.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“You can never go back, only forward. I read that in a book once.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“And sometimes, when a lot has happened in your life, much of it inexplicable, silence is what you need to say the most.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

“There is no beginning. We are always in the middle.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence