Quotes from The End of Mr. Y

“Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“If something wants to be a story, it will be.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“I pray for meaning. I pray for the limits of reality to become clear. For a world – and a type of being – that makes sense. I pray for a life after death that is not like this life. I pray for the end of mystery. What would a life be like with all the mysteries solved? If there were no questions, there’d be no stories. If there were no stories, there’d be no language. If there was no language there’d be no . . . What?”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“Over to my left is the big grey wall in front of the church.

Are we the Thoughts of God? a poster asks.

No, I realise. It's the reverse. ”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“So if we're all quarks and electrons ..." he begins.

What?"

We could make love and it would be nothing more than quarks and electrons rubbing together."

Better than that," I say. "Nothing really 'rubs together' in the microscopic world. Matter never really touches other matter, so we could make love without any of our atoms touching at all. Remember that electrons sit on the outside of atoms, repelling other electrons. So we could make love and actually repel each other at the same time.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“Oh fuck. It’s like period pain in my head. It’s toothache of the brain.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“Sometimes I wake up with such an immense sense of disappointment that I can hardly breathe.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“Homeopaths argue that water has a memory.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“The sky was the colour of sad weddings.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“I wonder at what point my life swerved to avoid that, and if that life would have been nicer than the one I've got.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“And every one of these events is connected. But not by luck: it's pure cause and effect.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“Sometimes I like to think I live with ghosts. Not from my past, but wispy bits of ideas and books that hang in the air like silk puppets. Sometimes I think I see my own ideas, floating around too, but they usually don't last that long. They're more like mayflies; they're born, big and gleaming, and then they fly around, buzzing like crazy before they fall to the floor, dead, about twenty four hours later.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“I don’t have bionic arms, and I have absolutely no stamina. Once I rubbed out the penciled-in marginalia of a hundred pages of a book that I wanted to photocopy (long story) and afterwards it felt like I’d been wanking off a giant for a hundred years.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“Někdy si ráda představuju, že bydlím s přízraky. Ne s těmi ze své minulosti - v takové nevěřím -, ale s průhlednými kusy myšlenek a knih visícími ve vzduchu jako hedvábné loutky.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“Sometimes I wake up with such an immense sense of disappointment that I can hardly breathe. Usually nothing has obviously triggered it and I put it down to some combination of an unhappy childhood and bad dreams (those two things go very well together).”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“There's a woman in the bakery who smiles at me as if everyone I've ever known has just died.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“Heather cocks her head to one side as if she's trying to make the information roll down a hill in her mind and come to rest in a place she can access it.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“My mind now has a celebration party and a funeral going on in the same room.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“Can something be created in language independently of the people who use the language? Can language become a self-replicating system or …’ I’m drunk, I suddenly realise, so I shut up. But”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“Nothing means anything but you still have to follow the rules.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“I sit up in bed slowly, feeling the disappointment trickle away like puddles after a rain shower.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“I hate the honesty of the moring; the time before your consiousness switches on the light and gets rid of all the nasty shadows.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“It was not my physical being, however, which was descending, but rather my mind. It was as if the thinking, reasoning part of my being was closing with the finality of a heavy, locked door.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“There's something romantic about it, of course, in the way only other people's lives can be.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

“This isn't a ride you can take again, but one, I'm guessing, that is simply impossible to get off.”
― Scarlett Thomas, quote from The End of Mr. Y

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Popular quotes

“When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.”
― Derrick Jensen, quote from A Language Older Than Words

“It hurts to breathe. It hurts to live. I hate her, yet I do not think I can exist without her.”
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“Up there on Olympus, where he’d been raised, where the mountain of reason pierces the sky of the intellect, the talk was all of how the soul suffered if the senses were gratified. Polly Patch would not allow it. She claimed, as the Devil would, that the senses and the soul were one: that gratifying one was to gratify the other.”
― Fay Weldon, quote from The Life and Loves of a She Devil

“...whatever/ returns from oblivion/ returns to find a voice.”
― Louise Glück, quote from The Wild Iris

“Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Via web one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him. What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we’d always take the harder one. Not just because it was more valuable, but because it was harder. We delighted in forcing bigger, slower competitors to follow us over difficult ground. Like guerillas, startups prefer the difficult terrain of the mountains, where the troops of the central government can’t follow. I can remember times when we were just exhausted after wrestling all day with some horrible technical problem. And I’d be delighted, because something that was hard for us would be impossible for our competitors.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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