Pulley Quotes

This water was very different from any ordinary food. It was born from the walk under the stars, the song of the pulley, the effort of carrying him in my arms. It did the heart good, like a present. When I was a little boy, the lights of the Christmas tree, the music of the midnight mass, the sweetness of people's smiles, all formed part of the radiance of the Christmas gifts I received. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

We might even purposely create time for boredom on a summer day, so they have to go to the garage and see what interesting fun they can have with a pulley, some rope, and a roll of duct tape. ~ Daniel J. Siegel

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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

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

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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

Dr. S didn't notice. "Do you remember the cartoons of Rube Goldberg? An inventor of the most ludicrous contraptions. You know: a lever is pulled, causing a boot to kick a dog, whose bark motivates a hamster to run on a wheel which winds a pulley that raises a gate that releases a bowling ball and so on? Until, at the end, finally, the machine does something incredibly mundane, like making a piece of toast. Yes? Well, as it turns out, that's the world. All these incredibly complex, inscrutably intertwined Rube Goldberg machines that can only be seen in retrospect when something happens. ~ Adam Felber

I will come for you. Roll my strength into a ball for you. Throw myself across chance for you. I will be the bridge or the pulley because you are the dream. ~ Jeanette Winterson

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

Is it white wine? Red tastes like vinegar.'

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

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) ~ Natasha Pulley

On hearing this remark, my heart jumped clear up in my throat.. I thought surely it was going to hop right out on the depot platform. I looked up and tried to tell him who I was, but something went wrong. When the words finally came out they sounded like the squeaky old pulley on our well when Mama drew up a bucket of water. ~ Wilson Rawls

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

And the kittykats would have to erect scaffolding and a pulley to get him down. Mind you, I wouldn't put that past them. Sometimes when they are behind the sofa supposedly purring, I think they are drilling. ~ Louise Rennison

The water in the drains below the cobbles muttered. ~ Natasha Pulley

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

These bankers here ain't no different than anybody else. They lie, they cheat, they steal. Difference is, they don't get caught. ~ D.M. Pulley

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

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

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

. . .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) ~ Natasha Pulley

The flag atop the Main Street flagpole is flown at half-staff only when Walt Disney passed away, a U.S. President dies in office, or the pulley gets stuck. ~ Horatio Liar

Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat. ~ Michael Ondaatje

Being solitary isn't a disease that needs a cure. ~ Natasha Pulley

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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

Sure, I watched the workmen come and lower large pieces of rotten sheetrock and lift new clean panels on a pulley
from that same window months ago, and I could have written then, but I must have sensed her coming, the smoker, so I waited. ~ Kristen Henderson

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

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

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

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

Chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don't see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can't make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future.
If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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

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. ~ Natasha Pulley

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

This water was indeed a different thing from ordinary nourishment. Its sweetness was born of the walk under the stars, the song of the pulley, the effort of my arms. It was good for the heart, like a present. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery