Cloud Atlas Quotes

'Cloud Atlas' is for everybody. The main character in the movie is humanity. ~ Lilly Wachowski

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror."
I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.
Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to. ~ David Mitchell

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners? ~ David Mitchell

Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths. ~ David Mitchell

We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us. ~ Liam Callanan

Yesterday, I never believed I'd do what I did today. ~ Cloud Atlas

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late. ~ David Mitchell

If I could create something that is even minutely close to a small percentile of a genius as Cloud Atlas, I shall deem my life worthy! ~ K. Hari Kumar

Every nowhere is somewhere[...] ~ David Mitchell

All boundaries are conventions. ~ David Mitchell

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds. ~ David Mitchell

Sixsmith. I climb the steps of the Scot monument every morning and all becomes clear. Wish I could make you see this brightness. Don't worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well. I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so. Moments like this, I can feel your heart beating as clearly as I feel my own, and I know that separation is an illusion. My life extends far beyond the limitations of me. ~ Cloud Atlas 2012 Movie

But this graveyard of dead books doesn't unnerve me. It reminds me that I had a deeper motive, one that only the approach of old age and death has unlocked. I wrote to answer questions I had - the motive of all art, whatever its ostensible subject. There were things I urgently needed to know. ~ James Atlas

In the beginning I tried to accommodate everything there that was somewhere between art and garbage and that somehow seemed important to me and a pity to throw away. After a while, some sheets in the Atlas acquired another value, after all - that is, it seemed to me that they could stand on their own terms, not only under the protection of the Atlas. ~ Gerhard Richter

A cloud that has gathered over us; though 'we have wronged no man, corrupted no man, defrauded no man!' Though perhaps we have 'done that which was right in our own eyes. ~ Thomas Hardy

Escape from the black cloud that surrounds you.
Then you will see your own light as radiant as the full moon. ~ Rumi

And suddenly the cockpit of the Lancaster breasts the cloud tops, and there is the sky, vast and clear and brilliantly blue. The wisps of cloud that rush past you are so white that you can't believe you've ever seen true whiteness before. ~ Jack Currie

The faces you clutch at desperately slip away; it's when you're not thinking about them that their features flash past. It can happen on a street corner, at the turn of a staircase, because somebody said a word, because some image, an image has passed. Then the face is there for a split second, very fragile. One mustn't grasp at it, or it whisks away. One might as well try and catch a cloud. It was a cloud. ~ Francois Maspero

And as we stood there, a curious thing happened: a kind of window opened in the rain, just as if a cloud had been hitched aside like a curtain, and in the space between we saw a landscape that took our breath away. The high ground along which the road ran fell away through a black, woody belt, and beyond it, for more miles than you can imagine, lay the whole basin of the Black Country, clear, amazingly clear, with innumerable smokestacks rising out of it like the merchant shipping of the world laid up in an estuary at low tide, each chimney flying a great pennant of smoke that blew away eastward by the wind, and the whole scene bleared by the light of a sulphurous sunset. No one need ever tell me again that the Black Country isn't beautiful. In all Shrophire and Radnor we'd seen nothing to touch it for vastness and savagery. And then this apocalyptic light! It was like a landscape of the end of the world, and, curiously enough, though men had built the chimneys and fired the furnaces that fed the smoke, you felt that the magnificence of the scene owed nothing to them. Its beauty was singularly inhuman and its terror – for it was terrible, you know – elemental. It made me wonder why you people who were born and bred there ever write about anything else. ~ Francis Brett Young

She had seen that look before, on the faces of white women, strangers on the street, who would see her hand clasped in Curt's and instantly cloud their faces with that look. The look of people confronting a great tribal loss. It was not merely because Curt was white, it was the kind of white he was, the untamed golden hair and handsome face, the athlete's body, the sunny charm and the smell, around him, of money. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She stood beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her. ~ Ayn Rand

Your basic needs are bedding, water protection, water carrier, food, any necessary medical supplies, something for fire making and a mobile phone. If you have your dog with you, then you need to carry his or her food, inoculation certificate and water bowl. There are some dogs that don't mind carrying a backpack, but don't over pack it. Everything else is just wants and not needs. ~ G.A. Iron Cloud

She was a whirling cloud of death, a queen of shadows, and these men were already carrion. ~ Sarah J. Maas

And each time he finished a sentence, there was a tiny but meaningful lump of silence left behind. This lump floated there, enclosed in the car's restricted space like an imaginary miniature cloud, giving Aomame a strangely unsettled feeling. ~ Haruki Murakami

One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west. ~ Colum McCann

The United States has an unfair advantage, as most of the popular cloud services, search engines, computer and mobile operating systems or web browsers are made by U.S. companies. When the rest of the world uses the net, they are effectively using U.S.-based services, making them a legal target for U.S. intelligence. ~ Mikko Hypponen

I started to feel as though I were disappearing. Perhaps I myself was figment of my own imagination, a storm cloud, a wisp of smoke, a burning ember. ~ Alice Hoffman

It was new to feel protected, and to feel that it was right to accept the protection, to surrender - right, because this peculiar sense of safety was ... not the protection of being spared from battle, but of having won it, not a protection granted to her weakness, but to her strength ... ~ Ayn Rand

A good test of a relationship is how a person responds to the word 'no.' Love respects 'no,' control does not. ~ Henry Cloud

Joe didn't like talking so much. He had already used more words in this room than he had in the past month. But he had no choice but to continue. Self-doubt began to creep into his consciousness, like a black storm cloud easing over the top of the mountains. He wasn't sure this was a job he could do well, a role he could play competently. Joe liked working the margins, keeping his mouth shut, observing from the sidelines. He did his best to block out the image of the thunderhead rolling over. ~ C.J. Box

This was governed entirely by Newtonian mechanics. Each piece of the moon attracted every other piece more or less strongly depending on its mass and its distance. It could be simulated on a computer quite easily. The whole rubble cloud was gravitationally bound. Any shrapnel fast enough to escape had done so already. The rest was drifting around in a loose huddle of rocks. Sometimes they banged into one another. Eventually they would stick together and the moon would begin to re-form. ~ Neal Stephenson

Dharma talks aren't the truth. The true Dharma exists in the mind of the students as seeds and the Dharma talks are just like a little cloud that releases rain and causes the seeds in the mind of the practitioners to sprout and manifest. Dharma teachers can't transmit the truth any more than a parent can fully transmit his experiences to his child. The more a parent scolds a child, the more the child becomes blocked. The best a parent can do is be like the rain cloud and nourish the seeds of wisdom in the child. When the child grows up and trips over difficulties and has his own experience, then the wisdom that was watered will manifest. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud. ~ Bruce Sterling

All unique and unrepeatable, like cloud-shadows on mountains or flames in a fire. ~ Alison Allen-Gray

The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is a spiritual guide to contemplative prayer. "Be willing to be blind, and give up all longing to know the why and how, for knowing will be more of a hindrance than a help." This 1912 edition was edited by Evelyn Underhill, and contains her introduction. ~ Geerhardus Vos

A story is a map of the world. A gloriously colored and wonderful map, the sort one often sees framed and hanging on the wall in a study full of plush chairs and stained-glass lamps: painstakingly lettered, researched down to the last pebble and participle, drawn with dash and flair, with cloud-goddesses in the corners and giant squid squirming up out of the sea ... [T]here are more maps in the world than anyone can count. Every person draws a map that shows themselves at the center. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Oft the cloud that wraps the present hour serves but to brighten all our future days. ~ William Browne

In samadhi, in the highest form of meditation, the same thing happens: the mind stops functioning ... but you are conscious. That is the only difference, but the difference that makes the difference. One is fully alert, luminous. One is there witnessing, watching, but there is no cloud of thought. The sky is utterly empty: as far as you can see you cannot see any content. ~ Rajneesh

Anyone watching her would have thought her cold, indifferent, but this was the only way she knew to tackle her deepest troubles, to shoo them aside as if they were a cloud of summer gnats, and deal with the task at hand brusquely and efficiently. Hannah always thought of it as her mother's Englishness, that ability to equalize problems so that a scuffed shoe and an impending disaster were almost equally distasteful, but both were born with aplomb. ~ Laura L. Sullivan

I was a cloud stuck inside a person I didn't choose to be. ~ Cyrus Grace Dunham

Tavoris Cloud might actually be hungrier than me. How often do you hear a fighter say that his opponent is hungrier than he is? I don't need hunger. I'm motivated by my desire to prove that I'm different and that I can still silence the critics. ~ Bernard Hopkins

But the sky! The sky is blue. Its limpidness is not marred by a single cloud. (How primitive was the taste of the ancients, since their poets were always inspired by these senseless, formless, stupidly rushing accumulations of vapor!) ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

The sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory well covered by cloud till it seemed there'd be no show at all. ~ Clive Barker

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted. ~ Franz Kafka

And we are put on earth a little space,
that we may learn to bear the beams of love;
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove. ~ William Blake

Bribe cartographers to remove us from the atlas. ~ Melancton Hawks

What ideal, immutable Platonic cloud could equal the beauty and perfection of any ordinary everyday cloud floating over, say, Tuba City, Arizona, on a hot day in June? ~ Edward Abbey

Love conquers all...
Every cloud has a silver lining...
Faith can move mountains...
Love will always find a way...
Everything happens for a reason...
Where there is life, there is hope.
...Hmph...They gotta tell ya somethin'. ~ Aileen Wuornos

On the contrary, an airy and innocent playfulness seemed to flicker like the shadow of summer leaves over her childish face, and around her buoyant figure. She was always in motion, always with a half-smile on her rosy mouth, flying hither and thither, with an undulating and cloud-like tread, singing to herself as she moved, as in a happy dream. Her father and female guardian were incessantly busy in pursuit of her, but, when caught, she melted from them again like a summer cloud; and as no word of chiding or reproof ever fell on her ear for whatever she chose to do, she pursued her own way all over the boat. Always dressed in white, she seemed to move like a shadow through all sorts of places, without contracting spot or stain; and there was not a corner or nook, above or below, where those fairy footsteps had not glided, and that visionary, golden head, with its deep blue eyes, fleeted along. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

Through darkness comes light, through fear comes love, and through pain comes triumph. ~ Lilly Atlas

There were such sounds as are not heard in daylight - moon sounds and cloud sounds and sounds of dark wind; branches talked and other small voices answered in anxious undertones. ~ Katharine Newlin Burt

Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. ~ Ayn Rand

Astronomers who were recently sifting through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a big dust cloud at the center of our galaxy, found a substance there called ethyl formate, which is the chemical responsible for the flavor of raspberries, and the smell of rum, the drink popular with pirates. Therefore, our galaxy tastes a bit of raspberries and smells of rum, which is nice. ~ John Connolly

One branch after another of chemistry, physics, and cosmology has merged in the majestic river as it approaches the estuary-to be swallowed up by the ocean, lose its identity, and evaporate into the clouds; the final act of the great vanishing process, and the beginning, one hopes, of a new cycle. It has been said that we know more and more about less and less. It seems that the more universal the 'laws' which we discover, the more elusive they become, and that the ultimate consummation of all rivers of knowledge is in the cloud of unknowing. ~ Arthur Koestler

A cloud, the exact color of the boy's hat and shaped like a turnip, had descended over the sun, and another, worse looking, crouched behind the car. Mr. Shiftlet felt that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him. ~ Flannery O'Connor

He was troubled; this brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; there was a cloud in this crystal. ~ Victor Hugo