Natasha Pulley Quotes

The water in the drains below the cobbles muttered.

Being mad isn't an excuse for being vague. Can we at least have specific madness?

People shouldn't be throwing away their history when it's still doing archery practice forty miles up the road.

Loyalty is a continuous phenomenon, you don't score points for past action,

I'll give you a cake if you get him in the stream by the end of the afternoon,' Mori said to Six.

'Hold on,' Thaniel said. 'No making criminals of the orphans, Fagin.'

'But I want some cake,' Six frowned. 'And his name isn't Fagin.

Mori made an unwilling sound. 'I don't like Western art.'

'No look at this.' He lifted it from its package. It wasn't heavy. 'It's clever, it looks like busy Mozart.'

'What?'

'I . . .' Thaniel sighed. 'I see sound. Mozart looks like this. You know. Fast strings.'

'See? In front of you?'

'Yes. I'm not mad.'

'I didn't think so. All sounds?'

'Yes.

He was not poor - he could afford ten candles & two baths a week. He wasn't going to throw himself in the Thames for the misery of it all and God knew most of London was worse off. All the same, he had a feeling life should not have been about ten candles and two baths a week.

It is not summer, England doesn't have summer, it has continuous autumn with a fortnight's variation here and there.

When they returned to Filigree Street, Mori refused even to go upstairs. Instead he hid under a quilt in the parlour with Thaniel's never-read copy of Anna Karenina. The Russians, he said, knew how to write genuinely boring novels, and he would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough. They were all the more boring because he could remember reading the end in the recent future.

I'd always thought it was gaudy, but standing there watching him beside the gold and glass shrine, I realised that his was a candlelight faith. It didn't work in the clear unforgiving light in London or Scandinavia, where even the dust in the cathedrals showed. But in the warm dimness and the shadows, what would have been tasteless at home made sense. The shrine looked like an oil painting made into real substance. So did he. England's was a reading religion, one it was difficult to understand at the bleak unimpressive first glance, one that needed books to explain itself. But his was images and images, the same as the old stages, in a place where not everyone could read and good light was expensive.

What's gone before you, and what will come after,' I said instead.
'Beg pardon?'
'The past ahead. Time is like a river and you float with the current. Your ancestors set off before you did, so they're far ahead. Your descendants will sail it after.

Is it white wine? Red tastes like vinegar.'

'Of course it's white wine, I'm Japanese.

. . .She started to feel a bubble of lightness coming up through her ribs. It had been very fragile at first, but she thought now it was made of something stronger than suds. . .
(p. 121)

Being solitary isn't a disease that needs a cure.

In Japan, first names are only for who you're married to, or if you're being rude,' the watchmaker explained.

She waited by the blackboard, trying to scrape up enough of her abysmal Japanese to ask what was going on. Lectures were always in English, which was just as well, because she had the linguistic capability of a sea cucumber. As far as she could tell, the word for 'husband' and the word for 'prisoner' were identical. Half the faculty were still worried that she'd got Baron Matsumoto locked away in her attic.

It was the great evil of plays that every character had some kind of purpose. Absorb too much of them, and you could go about believing there was something wrong with you if you drifted unremarked towards your thirties, and coasted into a quiet beach of no interest to anyone.

Tallis with no pedal, Handel with, even the horrible organ piece that had been written for someone with three hands. He had thought it had all gone, but all he had done was lock himself up in a few little rooms and assume the rest of the house had fallen down. It hadn't. There were doors and doors, and dust, but when the curtains opened and the drapes came off, it was all where he had left it and hardly faded. He took his hands from the keys and sat with them in his lap instead, because his thoughts were echoing in the new space.

Why do you hate Indians? You know white people are are much worse, don't you? It isn't as though there's some kind of international bar you're not reaching out here. We're terrible at everything. Lasting much past forty-five. Learning more than one language. It's a miracle, actually; sickly prematurely aging worryingly inbred horsey idiots have managed to convince everyone else their way is best by no other means than firmness of manner and the tactical distribution of flags. I can't believe no one's called our bluff yet.

When a sign says don't walk on the grass, one hops.' He

What's the point of you?'
'I'm ornamental.'
'Sit down and don't touch anything.

Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said 'do not walk on the grass', one hopped. Anybody who didn't had failed to understand what Oxford was.

Mori looked across and was, briefly, a languageless, inhuman thing rescued from the sea and asked for an impious favour.

Stop looking at it as an impossible thing and start looking at it as a thing that must be done.

The cab took them past other libraries and townhouses, then the redbrick walls of Keble College with their zigzag patterns, which looked ridiculous and spoke, Grace suspected, of the general unavailability of proper Cotswolds sandstone.

Thaniel listened for a while longer, because the silence was so deep and clear that he could hear ghosts of the thirty-six of thirty-seven possible worlds in which Grace had not won at the roulette, and not stepped backward into him. He wished then that he could go back and that the ball had landed on another number. He would be none the wiser and he would be staying at Filigree Street, probably for years, still happy, and he wouldn't have stolen those years from a lonely man who was too decent to mention that they were missing.

My uncle is a phrenologist and says that the shape of his skull is typical of a liar.

The Ancient Greeks? If they had steam engines, why didn't they have trains?'
. . .
'They were philosophers; they put two and two together and got a goldfish.'
(p. 76)

People are like bees. They're all workers who could be queens, with the right stuff, but once a queen-making has begun, it can't be reversed. A bee that's half way a queen can't turn back into a worker. She'd starve. She must keep growing and then she must leave.

But he hadn't realized that grace is not a thing you performed, but a weight you carried.

Your science can save a man's life, but imagination makes it worth living.

What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.

'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment.

The safest way to success is to write according to the capacity of the stupidest member of the audience.

As to why you've got it, silly things help with nerves.

I don't tolerate you. I can't breathe when you're not here, I can't think, I can't write music properly, I spend my whole bloody life waiting for the post.

Chivalry - Kuroda, you know when women put vegetables on a spoon and zoom it round so their kids think it's a magic butterfly or something? Chivalry is just what your mum called being a decent human being so you'd feel like a really good boy when you were nice to people. Don't say it to grown-ups.

Six saw a caterpillar.'

'What kind?'

'Green, with purple and white zigzags.'

'I see,' Thaniel said slowly. Liking children did not keep him from being perplexed by them. He was recently too old to remember his own childhood with any clarity. 'I imagine that was exciting?'

She glanced up at him warily. 'No. It was just a caterpillar.

No,"Ito said gently, "we will not be needing soldiers. Accountants will do nicely."
Mutsuhito frowned. "How does one storm a castle with accountants ?"
"One buys it, sir.

The creeping sense that he might have seen him reading the book came up from the ground, but that was more anxiety than evidence.

Thaniel wondered if real geisha painted themselves white so that it was harder to see how angry they must be all the time.

I'm a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don't.