“Devil-boy Jack: A higher power than ours directs us against the wych-kin. There is no turning back. Thaniel Fox: There is no higher power, Devil-boy! And I am no-one s pawn, neither man nor wych nor whatever entity you speak of. Devil-boy Jack: I do not speak of entities. I speak of the force that created the physics of the universe, the force that makes time flow forward and not allow everything to happen at once, the force that sets the patterns to which the planets turn. Its weapons are coincidence, unlikelihood, happenstance. It is there when a man stops suddenly to pick up a coin dropped by another man ten days before, and the woman who is to be his wife bumps into him, and five hundred years hence their offspring rules half the world. It is there when a chance comment causes a scientist to think, What if...? and ten years later a great plague is cured. It is so vast that what we call chaos is simply another part of its order, with a shape too big to see. It has no name, nor will it ever have, though man may hint darkly at fate and destiny. It is what it is... the pattern. We may choose our own paths, but the pattern is always ahead of us. It is a way. It is the way.”
“Hunger is a way Of standing outside windows The entering takes away.”
“Character is just an invention, but it s an invention that serves as both reason and justification for our behaviour. - Broken Verses”
“What kind of God do you believe in? my answer is easy: I believe in a magnificent God”
“Ο θάνατος είναι πάντα από μόνος του μια απόδειξη ειλικρίνειας.”
“In the strange dreams of man, there are stories that are unknowingly being built by them. Mine are among the billions that remain untold.”
“Sometimes changing the world is as simple as changing the way you look at it.”
“Could mankind declare it was truly wise? Did man know everything on earth, or would he ever? Certainly not!”
“We all have our safe places, where none are invited. They are lonely rooms full of the musk of memory. Sanctuary rather than adventure.”
“Todo pasa y todo queda, / Pero lo nuestro es pasar, / Pasar haciendo caminos,/ Caminos sobre el mar.”
“Omnia mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est in speculum.”
“If nature has composed the human body so that in its proportions the seperate individual elements answer to the total form, then the Ancients seem to have had reason to decide that bringing their creations to full completion likewise required a correspondence bewteen the measure of individual elements and the appearance of the work as a whole.”
“I would like to believe and give in to my naiveté, I would like to embrace the fact that I am back in the place where the long fingers of civilization cannot reach me and rip my heart out. At this moment, I would like to embrace myself. I would like to be unconcerned with the rest of the world and take pleasure in knowing that I have found my home. All of my life, all of my adult life, which began with the first notion of understanding, I have been searching for this sensation. You, cruel world, have tried to bring me down, tried to crush me with your code of conduct, your ethics, and your preconceived limits on liberty. You have raped me and robbed me of happiness; you have stolen my dreams and my dignity, leaving me to rot with the rest of you. Today, I know I have escaped your poisoned web; I know your rules do not apply to me, for after all you have done to crush me, I am still standing proudly above the set of your sick play. I am in love—a feeling you no longer thought I was capable of. I am in love—living, breathing, dreaming again—triumphant over your sick schemes.”
“Please, God, Ruth would pray, don t let me be competitive. Let me realize what a privilege it is to study. Let me remember that knowledge must be pursued for its own sake and please, please stop me wanting to beat Verena Plackett in the exams. She prayed hard and she meant what she said. But God was busy that autumn as the International Brigade came back, defeated, from Spain, Hitler s bestialities increased, and sparrows everywhere continued to fall.”
“Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.”
“It was a train full of strangers, and they were all the same.”
“Lifes like a painters palette, just when you ve got everything worked out the colours change”