No Man's Land Quotes

“Theater’s physical, it’s a thing, it’s real. It’s carpentry, and paint, and flesh-and-blood actors right there in front of thee, living and breathing just like thee. Tha have to make the effort to forget they’re actors. But what’s up on that screen, that is another bloody world. Eternal faces and bodies that tha conner touch, that’ll never age. It’s just like Faerie. And we’ve made a bloody industry out of selling it to people, a dream they can never have, a place they’ll never go, people they can never be, but they’ll spend their whole bloody life yearning for it. No wonder they run off into the bloody Forest!”
― Richard K. Morgan, No Man's Land

“Cinema!” Folding his newspaper closed, putting it flat on the long wooden dining table with a thump. Warming to his theme. “All sitting there in the dark, staring into that light like it’s the door to another world. It’s not healthy.”
― Richard K. Morgan, No Man's Land

“You are already drowned. You are emptied out, all of you. You are hollow men. You drained yourselves fighting each other to a standstill in a pit of mud, and for what? Your fires and iron are become your funeral pyre. Your gods are tumbled, their promises broken. You have plumbed this dream of mastery you once had and found it a shallow, malnourishing lie. You cannot master the living world; you cannot even master yourselves. You have nothing left to resist us with.”
― Richard K. Morgan, No Man's Land

“Sometimes it was a thousand-year oak or a lone standing stone that commanded the pilgrimages. But the story was always the same—venture in, find the place, the shrine, the core of mystery, and your bleak unimportance in the scheme of things would be salved, your needs addressed, if not actually met, your longing at least acknowledged. You would be seen, by things older and wiser than you. You would be seen, by things that held court in the universe instead of merely existing there, by things of power that could listen and judge and respond. You would be seen.”
― Richard K. Morgan, No Man's Land

“The powers that be will always lie to thee, lad. Never forget that. They lied to get everyone into uniform and slaughtered under German guns.”
― Richard K. Morgan, No Man's Land

“Wise women are the keepers of secrets, young man. We don’t go just spilling them to any Tom, Dick, or Harry who shows up looking all earnest and edible.”
― Richard K. Morgan, No Man's Land

“But both men were inveterate tinkerers at heart, overloaded on the kind of forward-leaping faith that abounds in both scientists and entrepreneurs, and the fact they believed in one of their inventions 100 percent was no kind of guarantee it would actually work, come the crunch.”
― Richard K. Morgan, No Man's Land

“What I don’t believe is that there’s any world order, secret or otherwise. The men of”
― Richard K. Morgan, No Man's Land