Ian McDonald Quotes

The men had to use condoms. You didn't want to get hit by that stuff, flying. I said be kind and I did something worse than flying cum. I threw up all over him. I couldn't stop throwing up. That's not sexy.

In our five thousand years of civilization, our history has often been the handmaid of geography. We lie exactly midway between the North Pole and the Equator. We are the gateway between the Fertile Crescent and Europe, between landlocked Central Asia and the Mediterranean world and beyond that, the Atlantic. Peoples and empires have ebbed and flowed across this land. Even today sixty per cent of Europe's gas supply either passes down the Bosphorus or runs under our very feet through pipelines. We have always been the navel of the world. Yet our favoured location by its very nature surrounded us with historical enemies; to the north, Russia to the south, the Arabs; to the east, Persia and to the west, the Red Apple itself, Europe.'
The Red Apple, the myth of Ottoman imperialism. When Mehmet the Conqueror looked out from the parapets of his fortress of Europe at Constantinople, the Red Apple had been the golden globe in the open palm of Justinian's statue in the Hippodrome, the symbol of Roman power and ambition. Mehmet rode through the crumbling Hippodrome, the decaying streets of dying Byzantium and the Red Apple became Rome itself. The truth of the Red Apple was that it would always be unattainable, for it was the westering spirit, the globe of the setting sun itself.
'Now we find ourselves caught between Arab oil, Russian gas and Iranian radiation and we found that the only way we could take the Red Apple was by joining it.'
This is poor stuff, Georgios thin

The sense of power, of human ability, was so strong. Many of the men cried. Men are so easily moved.

I do rather like birds,' Abdullah Unul says. 'They're busy, active little things. They make do. Have you ever thought, if Istanbul were to have an official bird, what would it be? I bet you'd think stork straight away. Maybe a sparrow. Me, the official bird of Istanbul would have to be the seagull. What do you see dancing around the Ramazan lights, what' s following the ships up and down the Bosphorus, what's facing into the wind on the rocks down by the water side. The common or garden gull, that's what. For all those reasons, the seagull for me is Istanbul, but mostly because it practises kleptoparasitism. You may not have heard of that. I'll explain. It's a behaviour when one animal takes prey from another that has the job of catching or killing it. In seagulls it's letting some other bird do all the hard work of catching the fish or a bit of bread and then taking it off them as they're about to eat it. It's the reason they're the success they are. So, I'll have that Koran. Both parts. To be honest, I'd prefer cash, but I imagine there's a market for that gadgetry you have out there in Fenerbahçe.

Grandfather was a tree

It is a fake, but a good fake. Turkey is the land of the masterful fake. But it is far far from that hateful little eighth-floor apartment huddling between the roar of the expressway and the blare of the mosque.

The geek of the Earth are a tribe and they are mighty.

Is this a Kurdish thing?'
'What?'
'Being deliberately contradictory?

He is a gross man-mountain balanced on strangely tiny feet. Not fat, vast.

Handsome boys fighting in not many clothes. Even better than handsome boys marrying.

It is always dangerous when your enemy has a sense of humor. Ask Batman.

Have you ever looked at a map of our country, Necdet?' Green Headscarf says. 'It's a map of the human mind. We're split by water over two continents, Europe and Anatolia. We are seven per cent Europe, ninety-three per cent Asia. Conscious Thrace, unconscious, pre-conscious, sub-concious Anatolia. And Istanbul - have you ever seen a neuron, Necdet? A brain cell? The marvel is that the synapses don't touch. There is always a gap - there must a gap, otherwise consciousness would not exist. The Bosphorus is that synaptic cleft. Potential can flow across the cleft. It's the cleft that makes consciousness possible.

Sensitive dependence on initial conditions; one word, one act, can change the world. Well they named it chaos theory.

Mr. Durukan, if God is dead then everything is conspiracy.

He's never fought with religion; what is the point of railing against such beauty, such intimate theatre, such chime of eternity? He can treasure it without believing in it.

...they were triplets and as mutually indistinguishable as peas in a pod or days in a prison.

The implants just give you a new set of reproductive-free imperatives, that's all. The rest, thank the gods, is up to you. They wouldn't be worth anything if they didn't give rise to the most troubling and complex problems of the heart. They are what makes all this glory, this madness worthwhile. We are born to the trouble as sparks fly upwards, that is what is great about us, man, woman, transgen, nute.

We always thought the robot apocalypse would be fleets of killer drones and war mecha the size of apartment blocks and terminators with red eyes. Not a row of mechanised checkouts

Thomas Lull knows he is un-American: he hates cars but loves trains, Indian trains, big trains like a nation on the move. He is content with the contradiction that they are at once hierarchical and democratic, a temporary community brought together for a time; vital while it lasts, burning away like early mist when the terminus is reached.

Marcelina loved that miniscule, precise moment when the needle entered her face. It was silver; it was pure. It was the violence that healed, the violation that brought perfection. There was no pain, never any pain, only a sense of the most delicate of penetrations, like a mosquito exquisitely sipping blood, a precision piece of human technology slipping between the gross tissues and cells of her flesh. She could see the needle out of the corner of her eye; in the foreshortened reality of the ultra-close-up it was like the stem of a steel flower. The latex-gloved hand that held the syringe was as vast as the creating hand of God: Marcelina had watched it swim across her field of vision, seeking its spot, so close, so thrillingly, dangerously close to her naked eyeball. And then the gentle stab. Always she closed her eyes as the fingers applied pressure to the plunger. She wanted to feel the poison entering her flesh, imagine it whipping the bloated, slack, lazy cells into panic, the washes of immune response chemicals as they realized they were under toxic attack; the blessed inflammation, the swelling of the wrinkled, lined skin into smoothness, tightness, beauty, youth.

Marcelina Hoffman was well on her way to becoming a Botox junkie.

Such a simple treat; the beauty salon was on the same block as Canal Quatro. Marcelina had pioneered the lunch-hour face lift to such an extent that Lisandra had appropriated it as the premise for an entire series. Whore.

The present is an illusion.

Loss bites and pulls. It is a thing of hooks sunk into every part of you, parts that you would not think could feel loss like thumbs and lips, hooks moored to wind and memory so that slightest disturbance, the slightest act of recall, tugs at those fine lines. Red is the colour of loss and its smell is like burned roses.

Time spent in the company of remarkable men is time well spent.

A CITY IS AS much a state of mind as a place - a set of perceptions of place. On the last train home to Mullaghbrack or Gortyfarnham or half a hundred other BallyBogMans, two farmers fall to reviewing their experiences of the big city. One has walked the streets and avenues and come away with memories of glistening steeples and dreaming spires, monuments to men of bearing and import, Palladian porticos and grand civic cupolas, pillars, piers, and palisades, and the air full of singing birds. The other has walked the same streets, yet his memories are of grey brick tenements shouldering against each other like nervous thugs; cracked fanlights, windows boarded over with card, baby carriages full of coal or potatoes, tramps in doorways, cabbage leaves underfoot, the perfume of urine and porter, pressing people with voices like flatirons. They might have visited cities continents apart, but it is the same city.

Time was, time will be again.

The might and magic of money is not what it allows you to own; it is what it allows you to be. Money is freedom.

After the plates are removed by the silent and swift waiting staff, General Çiller leans forward and says across the table to Güney, 'What's this I'm reading in Hürriyet about Strasbourg breaking up the nation?'
'It's not breaking up the nation. It's a French motion to implement European Regional Directive 8182 which calls for a Kurdish Regional Parliament.'
'And that's not breaking up the nation?' General Çiller throws up his hands in exasperation. He's a big, square man, the model of the military, but he moves freely and lightly 'The French prancing all over the legacy of Atatürk? What do you think, Mr Sarioğlu?'
The trap could not be any more obvious but Ayşe sees Adnan straighten his tie, the code for, Trust me, I know what I'm doing,
'What I think about the legacy of Atatürk, General? Let it go. I don't care. The age of Atatürk is over.'
Guests stiffen around the table, breath subtly indrawn; social gasps. This is heresy. People have been shot down in the streets of Istanbul for less. Adnan commands every eye.
'Atatürk was father of the nation, unquestionably. No Atatürk, no Turkey. But, at some point every child has to leave his father. You have to stand on your own two feet and find out if you're a man. We're like kids that go on about how great their dads are; my dad's the strongest, the best wrestler, the fastest driver, the biggest moustache. And when someone squares up to us, or calls us a name or even looks at us squinty, we run back

We were young and thought we were invincible and we threw ourselves into the gears of history and it ground us up.

Water splashes and runs in a film across the glass floor suspended above the mosaics. The Hacı Kadın hamam is a typical post-Union fusion of architectures; Ottoman domes and niches built over some forgotten Byzantine palace, years and decades of trash blinding, gagging, burying the angel-eyed Greek faces in the mosaic floor; century upon century. That haunted face was only exposed to the light again when the builders tore down the cheap apartment blocks and discovered a wonder. But Istanbul is wonder upon wonder, sedimented wonder, metamorphic cross-bedded wonder. You can't plant a row of beans without turning up some saint or Sufi. At some point every country realizes it must eat its history. Romans ate Greeks, Byzantines ate Romans, Ottomans ate Byzantines, Turks ate Ottomans. The EU eats everything. Again, the splash and run as Ferid Bey scoops warm water in a bronze bowl from the marble basin and pours it over his head.

If there is one thing will kill Turkey,' she would say, 'it is a famine of ideas.'
No one in her coterie dared mention that if anything was killing Turkey it was a surfeit of ideas, too many political visions and ideologies. But the head of the school of economics did mention a particularly bright and aggressive undergraduate who was fighting a ridiculous but valorous battle against an American academic of ten times his experience and a hundred times his reputation. Three days later the invitation arrived on Georgios Ferentinou's desk. Not even his unworldliness could ignore a summons from Meryem Nasi. So he found himself stiff as a wire in a hired suit and cheap shoes clutching a glass on her Yeniköy terrace, grimacing nervously at anyone who moved through his personal space.

Nothing tells you that you are not on Earth anymore than exhaling at one price and inhaling at another.

And how did you find the East?'
'It's a shit-hole. But it's our shit-hole.

The freefall sex? Grossly oversold. Everything moves in all the wrong ways. Things get away from you. You have to strap everything down to get purchase. It's more like mutual bondage.

Ayşe has always admired the Ottoman talent for euphemism. The Auspicious Event was the massacre and execution of ten thousand Janissaries. Bodies had been heaped in the Hippodrome, rotting in the June heat. The more perfumed the language, the more brutal the repression.

Family is what works.

Wherever you are, stay there. I will find you. The world darkens and narrows; the places where we can communicate, where we can meet, are diminishing and departing.

Language and how close it comes to truth, and how far away it is.

The time is short and the hills is dark and I's got miles to go before I sleeps. Is is no easy road.

You collect art: you must know that the miniature artists, at the end of careers spent painting the tiniest, most exacting details that no one would ever look at, would often put their eyes out with needles. Too much beauty, yes, but also too much seeing. They were tired of seeing. The dark was safe and warm and comfortable. Blindness was a gift. I still have seeing to do.

Like these entities may be the lost acres of the mind, things that have been overlooked by the higher consciousness; that it can't see them, can't process them, fills in the space where they are by folding up the visual map around them., putting things on either side next to each other, like the blind spot in the eye.

Any AI smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.

Fake it may be, lies and deceptions, but this is the world in which we find ourselves, and here we must make our little lives.

There's never been a rule of human behavior that hasn't been broken by someone, somewhere, sometime, in some circumstance mundane or spectacular. To be human is to transcend the rules.

In the Age of Kali the meek and helpless will be preyed upon without mercy, and there will be a surplus of AK-47s.

The prices are vertiginous. Carlinhos and Wagner take a booth and they talk and dip their wafers of exquisite beef into the sauces but most of the time they keep companionable silence together, as close men do, and find they have communicated everything. Run

Her face had always held too much personality to be merely beautiful.

The army doctor who had patched up his hands and examined him after the rescue at Kayişdaği told him a story about the Mevlana, the great saint whose order built this tekke. The Mevlana had a friend, Şams of Tabriz, a spiritual friend, the other half of his soul, one spirit in two bodies. Together they explored the depth of God in ceaseless conversation. The dervishes grew jealous of the one-in-twoness and quietly killed Şams of Tabriz. When the Mevlana was unable to find his friend, the only possible conclusion was that they had merged and Şams was now part of him.
Why should I seek?
I am the same as he.
His essence speaks through me.
I have been looking for myself.
Necdet knows how long Hızır will be with him.