“you can't save people from the world. There's nowhere else to take them.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You've already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both. But you have to open it to find that out.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“It’s not just Pandora who had that inescapable flaw. It seems like everyone has been built in a way that sometimes makes them do wrong and stupid things.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“In an age of rust, she comes up stainless steel”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you’re only showing that you’re unworthy of it.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“the horror of the unknown is more frightening than any horror you can understand”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Every adult grew from a kid who beat the odds. But at different times, in different places, the odds have been appallingly steep.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“She’s as big as four-fifths of five-eighths of fuck all, but she takes no bullshit from anyone.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“It’s like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they’d be born out of the cocoon as something else.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Growing up and growing old. Playing. Exploring. Like Pooh and Piglet. And then like the Famous Five. And then like Heidi and Anne of Green Gables. And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both.
But you have to open it to find that out.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“She’s lived in Plato’s cave, staring at the shadows on the wall. Now she’s been turned around to face the fire.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“It's equinox, with the world balanced between winter and summer, life and death, like a spinning ball balanced on the tip of someone's finger.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Melanie finds this interesting in spite of herself — that you can use words to hide things, or not to touch them, or to pretend that they're something different than they are.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“This gauntlet, flung down by a bullying, contemptuous universe that allowed human beings to grope their way to sentience just so it could put them in their place that bit more painfully.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“When your dreams come true, your true has moved. You’ve already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“This isn’t life. It’s something that’s playing out in its own self-contained subroutine.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Denial is a stage she goes through very quickly indeed, because her reason strikes down the demeaning, treacherous thought as quickly as it rises. There’s no point in denying the truth when the truth is self-evident. There’s no point in denying the truth even if you have to wade through thorn thickets and minefields to get to it. The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you’re only showing that you’re unworthy of it.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“She's in the club. The hopelessly-outnumbered-and-surrounded-by-monsters club.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Because the bag is full of colours - starbursts and wheels and whorls of dazzling brightness that are as fine and complex in their structures as the branch is, only much more symmetrical. Flowers.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“you can’t save people from the world. There’s nowhere else to take them.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“It doesn’t matter,” she explains to Miss J. “I want to be where you are. And I don’t know the way back to wherever I was before, anyway. I don’t even remember it. All I remember is the block, and you. You’re…” Now it’s Melanie’s turn to hesitate. She doesn’t know the words for this. “You’re my bread,” she says at last. “When I’m hungry. I don’t mean that I want to eat you, Miss Justineau! I really don’t! I’d rather die than do that. I just mean… you fill me up the way the bread does to the man in the song. You make me feel like I don’t need anything else.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“I killed that boy, Parks. If you turn my life into an equation, the number that comes out is a minus one. That's my lifetime score, you understand me? And you... you and Caldwell, and Private Ginger fucking Rogers... my God, whether it means anything or not, I will die my own self before I let you take me down to minus two.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Hungries toggle between two states. They’re frozen in place most of the time, just standing there like they’re never going to move again. Then they smell prey, or hear it, or catch sight of it, and they break into that terrifying dead sprint. No warm-up, no warning. Warp factor nine.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“some things become true simply by being spoken.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“may we live as long as we want, and never want as long as we live,”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“Suddenly she’s an ant all scrunched up on the floor of that world. A static atom in a sea of change. The immensity of earth envelops her, and enters into her. She sips it, with each gulp of heady, supercharged atmosphere.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
“They're just kids. And their childhood has probably been as big a load of shit as his was. In a perfect world, he would have been one of them.”
― M.R. Carey, quote from The Girl With All the Gifts
M.R. Carey
Born place: in Liverpool, The United Kingdom
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“A short time before the war, some cultivated, intellectual, warm-hearted German friends of mine returned to Germany after living in the United States. In a very short time they turned into sworn Nazis. They refused to listen to the slightest criticism about Hitler. During a return visit to California, they met an old dear friend of theirs on the street, who had been very close to them and who was a Jew. They did not speak to him. They turned their backs on him when he held his hands out to embrace them. How can such a thing happen, I wondered. What changed their hearts so? What steps brought them to such cruelty? These”
― Kathrine Kressmann Taylor, quote from Address Unknown
“پاییز امسال یک کلاغ سپید پیدایش شد. همیشه با کمی فاصله پشت سر بقیه پرواز میکند و روی هر درختی بنشیند همجنسهایش از آن درخت پرهیز میکنند. درک نمیکنم که چرا بقیهٔ کلاغها دوستش ندارند. به چشم من پرندهای بهخصوص زیباست، ولی برای همجنسهایش انزجارانگیز است. میبینم که تنها روی کاج خودش چمباتمه میزند و به دشت خیره میشود؛ بطالتی غمگین که نمیباید وجود میداشت، کلاغی سپید. آنقدر آنجا مینشیند تا دستهٔ بزرگ کلاغها پرواز میکنند، آنوقت من کمی غذا برایش میبرم. آنقدر رام است که میتوانم نزدیکش شوم. گاهی وقتها تا میبیند دارم میآیم روی زمین جست و خیز میکند. از کجا بداند چرا طرد شده است. زندگی دیگری را نمیشناسد و همیشه طردشده باقی خواهد ماند. چنان تنهاست که از آدمیزاد کمتر میترسد تا از برادران سیاهش. شاید آنقدر از او منزجرند که حتی راضی نیستند با وسوسه منقارشان سوراخ سوراخش کنند. هر روز در انتظار کلاغ سپید مینشینم و او را به سوی خود میخوانم و او با دقت از میان چشمهای سرخرنگش براندازم میکند. برایش کار چندانی از دستم برنمیآید. آشغالهای من شاید زندگیای را طولانی میکنند که نباید طولانی شود. ولی من میخواهم کلاغ سپید زنده بماند. گاهی در عالم رؤیا میبینم که یک کلاغ سپید دیگر در جنگل هست و آن دو یکدیگر را پیدا خواهند کرد. رؤیایم را باور ندارم، فقط آرزو میکنم چنین باشد.”
― Marlen Haushofer, quote from The Wall
“a dangerous thing for any state to maintain its power by plugging up the vent of complaints, stifling the voices of the people. When complaining becomes a crime, hope becomes despair. He finished”
― Jeff Shaara, quote from Rise to Rebellion
“He's a monster, wrapped up in a pretty package. But I find myself wondering at times like this, when I feel the distance between us, if maybe in his eyes, the real monster is me.”
― J.M. Darhower, quote from Monster in His Eyes
“It’s bad enough . . . when a country gets colonized, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end.”
― Tsitsi Dangarembga, quote from Nervous Conditions
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Archangel's KissBookQuoters 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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