Lavie Tidhar Quotes

Pawns are such fascinating pieces, too ... So small, almost insignificant, and yet
they can depose kings. Don't you find that interesting?

The fat man looked amused. "What on earth for?" he said. "I never have any contact with writers. If I do, they just keep pestering me about getting paid.

These were the facts. Facts were important. They separated fiction from reality, the tawdry world of Mike Longshott from the concrete spaces of Joe's world.

A gentleman killed with bullets, the state with gas. Only a madman used a knife.

I was covered in gore, dripping in slime, and in a very bad mood.

Life isn't a pulp novel, Joe, and death isn't either.

What is a man! What is a man but mended cloth, hastily worn and discarded? ... What makes a man? What makes a hero, Shomer? Is it simply to live when there is nothing left to live for, when all you knew and loved is gone? Is it, simply, to survive? For like the threads of an intricate shawl, we have been pulled at and torn, Shomer. We have been unravelled.

But is it crime or an act of war? Depends on who's telling the story ...

This place might have been paradise, a treasure trove far greater than any to be found in a pirate yarn.
Everywhere he looked there were books.
They rose into the air in majestic columns, stacks and stacks of them forming a maze that seemed to stretch to forever; the stacks rose high into the air and disappeared towards the unseen ceiling. The air had the overwhelming smell of old books, of polished leather, and yellowing leaves, like the smell of a bookshop or a public library magnified a thousand-fold.

This is the time of myths. They are woven into the present like silk strands from the past, like a wire mesh from the future, creating an interlacing pattern, a grand design, a repeating motif. Don't dismiss myth, boy. And never, ever, dismiss the Bookman

Joe looked out of the window again. He had the feeling that outside the window there should have been hover-cars, men in trilby hats and jet packs, spider-webs of passageways spreading out of the distant tops of the towers. There should have been women in silver suits taking in a show at the tri-vids before indulging in a spot of lunch, the kind that came in three-course pills, great big subservient robots trailing behind them. Instead there was a brown man in overalls collecting rubbish with a long stick outside an adult cinema, and the cars were halted, bumper-to-bumper, beside a traffic light that seemed to be stuck permanently on red. There was a siren in the distance. There was the sound of car horns, a door slamming, someone cursing loudly in American English.

Orphan could no longer hear or see the shadows of the dead. He didn't think they had perished. Most likely they were hiding now, somewhere in this landscape of books.

It's a small publication dedicated to a scholarly discourse of the Osamaverse.

But he knew, too, that there is more than one story in this world at a time; and that her story was not his.
Their stories had entwined, but they had different trajectories, different conclusions. He could only hope the two stories would not separate. It was a strange sort of realisation: that he loved her.

Listen to this. A bomb goes off downtown and the police arrest the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and Osama Bin Laden. They put them in an identity parade and have a witness try to point out the perpetrator. Who does she pick?"
Joe said, "I don't know."
"Osama Bin Laden," the taxi driver said. "Because the other three don't exist.

They were all machines, he thought, just like La Mettrie had said in L'Homme Machine all those years ago. So he, Orphan, was a machine of flesh and blood, and Lucy, now, was made of something else, more complex perhaps- but they were the same and ...
They were in love.
Sometimes that was enough.

Destiny is like a book. It needs manufacturing, the pulp process, the glue fixed tightly
and it requires a binding, to hold it together, lest it fall apart.

London has always been a warren underground, and Pall Mall is no exception: secret passageways, Tube tunnels, sewers, cellars, more of London under- than above-ground.

I think a lot about the might-have-beens, the what-ifs. About the little places in history where one tiny, minute change can lead to a new and unimaginable future. It's like chess, so many permutations, probabilities, choices, cross-roads ... I think a lot about the future, our future. And I see uncertainty.

What if the Cairo Conference of 1921 went ahead as planned, with Churchill and T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell dividing up the Middle East for the British? What if they chose a Hashemite king to rule Iraq, and would that have led to a revolution in the nineteen fifties? Or, what if the French war in Indochina somehow led to American involvement in Vietnam? Or if the British held on to their colonies in Africa after the Second World War? You see – " he was in full steam now, his eyes shining like the headlamps of a speeding engine – "the Vigilante series is full of this sort of thing. A series of simple decisions made in hotel rooms and offices that led to a completely different world.

But it was not real freedom, he realised. It was the freedom that comes from lack of choice and moreover, was the kind that only came with decisions delayed. It was a freedom of inaction.

That big fat oaf Gil Chesterton once said that the criminal is the artist, the detective only the critic ... he was wrong. I was an artist, for it is an artist's purpose to make order out of chaos. A criminal defaces; a detective restores.

One dead copper, one dead whore. I was getting too old. Everything hurt. I would miss my books most, I thought. But books, like people, can always be replaced.

It is, perhaps, the prerogative of every man or woman to imagine, and thus force a shape, a meaning, onto that wild and meandering narrative of their lives, by choosing genre. A princess is rescued by a prince; a vampire stalks a victim in the dark; a student becomes a master. A circle is completed. An so on.

Family wasn't like that, not really. It was not something small and compact, a "nuclear family": it was a great big mess of people, all interlinked, cousins and aunts and relatives-by-marriage and otherwise
it was a network, like the Conversation or a human brain. It was what he had tried to escape, going into the Up and Out, but you cannot run away from family, it follows you, wherever you go.

Space was full of questions, life was a sentence always ending in an ellipsis or a question mark. You couldn't answer everything. You could only believe there were answers at all.

Meeting one's heroes is always such a disappointment.

For one crazy moment he had the notion of a vanished tribe of librarians, lost in the deep underground caverns of the Bodleian, a wild and savage tribe that fed on unwary travellers.

I still believe, though. In existing. In ex nihilo nihil fit. If nothing comes from nothing, we cannot return to it. Ergo life has a reason and needs to be.

It was a war about fear, he thought, not figures on the ground. It was a war of narrative, a story of a war, and it grew in the telling.

This is the time of myths, Orphan. They are the cables that run under the floors and power the world, the conduits of unseen currents, the steam that powers the great engines of the earth.

Other humans believed the same way they breathed: it came natural to them. The world was filled with synagogues and churches, mosques and temples, shrines to Elron and Ogko. New faiths rose and fell like breath. They bred like flies. They died like species.

Clocks are the enemies of time ... they are the gaolers of day and the turnkeys of night.
Tom Thumb

And also they're just good escapist fun," Vivian said firmly, and Gill subsided beside her, giving an apologetic smile. "To read about these horrible things and know they never happened, and when you're finished you can put down the book and take a deep breath and get on with your life. To know it's fiction – "
"Pulp fiction," Gill said ...

Think of the future, she whispers. Jumbled images in primary colours. White and red swastika flags waving in the wind; gleaming rockets flying into the air; skyscrapers rise above the Danube, the Thames, the Volga and the Rhine, blond children play under a bright African sun, their uniforms ironed to perfection by their servant-slaves nearby, modern women work at factories assembling Volkswagens, in the mountains in a wood cabin Maria and Erich and their three children go on a skiing holiday, laughing, holding hands…

Or perhaps it was curiosity that motivated them after all, that earliest of motives, the most human and the most suspect, the one that had led Adam to the Tree, in the dawn of Story.

Books, he thought, were a sort of migratory bird. Here they rested a while, weary of their travels, before taking flight again, before moving, settling in another nest for a time. They seemed to him like a flock that had descended on these tables, pages fluttering like wings, and here they rested in the shade, enjoying the lull, knowing it would soon be time to go on their way again.

I have a lot of time to think. To look at the strands of the past weave themselves into the knots of the present, and to imagine how the future might unfold from them. So many possibilities. Like a game of chess. And you, my little pawn, you are the catalyst, walking through the board one small step at a time, towards ... what? What sort of endgame will you bring us all, Orphan?