The Future Quotes

“It'll come back," Ulysses says again. "This place isn't made for disappearing, it's a place for resurrection.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“Cassandra doesn't need to read them, she knows what's inside; Mathilda doesn't ask her what that is--it doesn't matter; it won't stop her sister from being mesmerized, and when an idea worms its way inside her like this, time opens, the universe moves. Cassandra has an amazing aptitude: that of doing nothing other than thinking, yet still managing to change the world.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“With men, Mathilda knew instinctively where to aim: in the exact same spot they used to destroy little girls.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“The minute he opens his eyes, he sees them. In one of the books Stutt reads out loud, the person back from war keeps saying, "The minute I close my eyes, I see them." Yatim can tell that the person who wrote that story has never really experienced horror because, if they had, that person would know it's just the opposite: it's when you open your eyes that you see them, the people who died, the ones you hurt or couldn't save, the ones you liked without realizing it and will never see again; they live among us, like dreams outside sleep.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“It got to be a tradition: we set fires when we're happy, we set fires when we're not, we set fires when we've got nothin' better to do. It got so the city itself stepped in. It burns itself down. Houses combust spontaneously, entire blocks go up in flames at our city's will.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“Before setting off to work in the greenhouse, Stutt showed him a page in a book that looked like it had been dug up from the Earth's core, in which an elderly king named Henry advises his son to wage war on outsiders to keep his own subjects from revolting. The story, tough going and complicated, nonetheless proved to be a revelation for Lego; for the first time, he has understood what Stutt sees in books: a sense of discovering a reality impossible to conceive of beforehand but that, once grasped, reveals itself to be age-old, weighing on the mind as only truths one has been unaware of can. Words reveal things that are already there.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“What disappears with the death of a friend? Solomon wonders, standing in the field threatened by the storm. The funeral is over, the survivors have left, Caesar's body has been buried in the earth to which he devoted his last years. One of the things we lose, thinks Solomon, is the person we were with them, the parts of us they brought to life. With such an old friend, we are also stripped of the memory of what we once were.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“Eunice notes the way Gloria moves in slow motion. Or maybe she herself has sped up, the desperation of doubt, the torment of helplessness having accelerated her presence in the world. A law of relativity stemming from the heart.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“It's so easy to drown one's worries in those of others.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“She touches down at the foot of the yellow house, her heart heavy and unsettled with everything she knows but doesn't disclose. Sometimes it feels to her as though she has lived a thousand years and seen the whole of what there is to see, that she holds all secrets, all fables, all magic formulae of the world.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“That's changing. Changing faster than I can keep up with. That's always been the way. Everything changes too fast for me.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“Lac Sainte-Claire is itself a creature of the wild, a world where the synthetic and the organic commingle. At this early hour, it looks like a sheet of quicksilver being shaken by invisible hands. Then, as morning brings heat and light, plastic objects, immersed steel structures, and an oily sheen become visible on its surface. Large ships advance in cavernous silence, waterfowl rise above the horizon.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“In this case, it's about the present. About instability, isolation. Emotions have taken over. What we see is an illusion, and whatever we don't see is vast.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“Seems to me what it comes down to is, if a city's founded on a crime--"

"Détroit is founded on a dream as much as a crime...”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“People thought Fort Détroit was protected by an alliance of demons: the Catholics' Satan, the Odawa's Wendigo, and Nain Rouge, or the Demon of the Strait. The Americans wanted nothing to do with it.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“The exact opposite of the huge car factories she imagines as the city's womb, a uterus that makes automobiles the way others make promises, or laws.”
― Catherine Leroux, The Future

“Une des choses qu’on perd, pense Salomon, c’est celui qu’on était avec cette personne, les parties de nous qu’elle faisait exister.”
― Catherine Leroux, L’avenir

“les bruits sont comme les noeuds d’un tricot, des points qui se tiennent, s’accrochent les uns aux autres pour former l’étoffe de l’habitude, quelque chose de prévisible dans l’aléatoire de la vie dans le bois.”
― Catherine Leroux, L'Avenir