Tales from the Inner City Quotes

“And when you died
I took you down to the river.
And when I died
you waited for me by the shore.
So it was that time passed between us.”
― Shaun Tan, Tales from the Inner City

“And, once again, the bears showed us.

There they were, God help us, the Ledgers of the Earth, written in clouds and glaciers and sediments, tallied in the colours of the sun and the moon as light passed through the millennial sap of every living thing, and we looked upon it all with dread. Ours was not the only fiscal system in the world, it turned out. And worse, our debt was severe beyond reckoning. And worse than worse, all the capital we had accrued throughout history was a collective figment of the human imagination: every asset, stock and dollar. We owned nothing. The bears asked us to relinquish our hold on all that never belonged to us in the first place.

Well, this we simply could not do.

So we shot the bears.”
― Shaun Tan, Tales from the Inner City

“Horses know this more than most: The greatest curse of any animal is to be worth money to men.”
― Shaun Tan, Tales from the Inner City

“Explanation is a luxury we can't afford these days, and reality doesn't care for it, being far too busy following its own unknowable course.”
― Shaun Tan, Tales From the Inner City

“Maybe this is what our young doppelgangers failed to understand. They believed their good example would be enough. That being right was enough. They knew nothing about injured pride or the true inertia of human nature.”
― Shaun Tan, Tales from the Inner City

“How much do I love our family? This much. When any kind of emergency strikes, good or bad, we snap together like parts in a machine, like a submarine crew at war in the tin-can clutter of our home, none of the usual debate, character assassination, woeful monologues, and turgid hand-wringing. I've learned to love crises for this reason, how they make us pull together and forget our separateness and sadness; this was the second great gift of the moonfish.”
― Shaun Tan, Tales from the Inner City

“All things foamed and fogged and our minds slept where they stood. There was always more shovelling to do.”
― Shaun Tan, Tales from the Inner City