Cloud Atlas

My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there.

You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.

Fantasy. Lunacy. All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

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.

...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.

We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely.

Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths.

Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the theory of relativity and principals of uncertainty. Phenomena that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday, I believe I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. That each point of intersection, each encounter, suggest a new potential direction. Proposition, I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey. Is this possible? I just met her and yet, I feel like something important has happened to me.

We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears.

What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

...now I'm a spent firework; but at least I've been a firework.

. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.

Whoever opined "Money can't buy you happiness" obviously had far too much of the stuff.

In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.

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.

One fine day a predatory world shall consume itself.

& only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean! Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.