The Boy on the Bridge

He had already learned to read, but now he learned the pleasure of stories which is like no other pleasure—the experience of slipping sideways into another world and living there for as long as you want to.

Things don’t end, after all. They only change, and you keep changing with them.

Here was the Russia she'd loved since childhood, the dark, violent, passionate place where the life of the mind and spirit were as real as the life of the body.

Sanity is a suspended state, moored in nothing but itself. You test the ground an inch in front of you, move forward as though it's solid. But the whole world is in freefall and you're in freefall with it.

It rains on the just and the unjust. Nothing you can do but turn your collar up.

The point of history, the very essence of it as a field of study, is to find correspondences. You look at the past so that you can understand it, and through it you come to a better understanding of your own time.

If everyone always knows what they’re doing and acts in a perfectly rational way, how did most of world history happen?

They think he doesn’t understand. That he can’t see. They can’t see him.

She thinks: all journeys are the same journey, whether you're moving or not. And the things that look like endings are all just stations on the way.

She thinks: all journeys are the same journey, whether you know it or not, whether you’re moving or not. And the things that look like endings are all just stations on the way.

Pain has no agenda at all. It teaches us nothing, except what hurts. And if you can’t avoid the things that hurt then what use is the lesson?

They are in hell, but the devil is on their side.

To go mad, to lose your mind, which is the only thing that’s really yours because it’s really you … That would be an inexpressibly terrible thing. And at the same time it would be nothing, because you yourself would be unable, from within that damaged state, to recognise or reflect on it.

It’s absolutely necessary to know who you are, as the basis for knowing anything else.

If he says something that isn’t true, he is bringing uncertainty into the world. He is blinding the people around him to a small part of the truth—and every part of the truth is important. You can’t complete a jigsaw if one of its pieces has been swapped out for a piece of a different jigsaw.

She is an anomaly. Anomalies explode old theories and engender new ones. They are dangerous and glorious. Greaves

Loyalty is just the wheels on the bus ... meaning that it keeps things moving but it's neutral when it comes to the direction they move in.

She decided that day to study Russian, the language of violence, terror, and absurdity. She knew she would never be bored.

what’s so great about leaving your mark on things. You have a life and then it ends and you’re dead. Living it is the point, not proving to other people that you were there.

People only make sense from the inside, Foss has found. And that’s if you’re lucky.

The daytime burns with a single fire, and a lot of the time it burns fitfully. The night is a million suns exploding all at once, igniting the whole sky.

Do we always fret about our partners’ exes? he wonders. And do we extend that to everyone they knew before they met us? Is it their whole past we’re jealous of, as though we want them to be born again when we walk into their lives? It’s a depressing thought. He has believed himself to be bigger than that, and a whole lot more rational.

The world is information. An endless torrent. Whatever escapes you becomes something you will never completely understand.

You shouldn’t kill a man without being aware of the possibilities, the futures, you’re snuffing out. The younger the target, the more of those possible futures there are. Killing a child is like killing a vast multitude.

He is not a politician. He’s not even somebody who weighs his words. But he is, in the end, a conformist. A man whose centre of gravity can’t easily be found because he has never taken the time to work out where it is he wants to stand. He only knows his limits when he actually meets them, in the world. As,

Overthrow is a nicely judged word. It suggests a wrestler being flung to the mat. That only happens when you move outside your centre of gravity. Your enemy can’t throw you if you have your feet firmly planted. Which

You look at the past so that you can understand it, and through it you come to a better understanding of your own time. If you’re lucky, sometimes you can even extrapolate to possible futures.