Quotes from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

“Devil-boy Jack: "A higher power than ours directs us against the wych-kin. There is no turning back."

Thaniel Fox: "There is no higher power, Devil-boy! And I am no-one's pawn, neither man nor wych nor whatever entity you speak of."

Devil-boy Jack: "I do not speak of entities. I speak of the force that created the physics of the universe, the force that makes time flow forward and not allow everything to happen at once, the force that sets the patterns to which the planets turn. Its weapons are coincidence, unlikelihood, happenstance. It is there when a man stops suddenly to pick up a coin dropped by another man ten days before, and the woman who is to be his wife bumps into him, and five hundred years hence their offspring rules half the world. It is there when a chance comment causes a scientist to think, What if...? and ten years later a great plague is cured. It is so vast that what we call chaos is simply another part of its order, with a shape too big to see. It has no name, nor will it ever have, though man may hint darkly at fate and destiny. It is what it is... the pattern. We may choose our own paths, but the pattern is always ahead of us. It is a way. It is the way.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

“This was London, and you either held on, or fell by the walkside like that fellow had.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

“She was quite maniac when I met her. I scared her, maybe.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

“Mad she may be, or possessed; or maybe only scared out of her wits.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

“She felt like a proper lady, she did.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

“I want ... something other than what I know. She is so strange to me, you see? I think that her life must have been very different from mine (...) I want to know what that is like.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

“Suddenly it was if she was merely a brain, being transported inside the skull of some hideous fleshy machine, a piece of living cargo in someone else's body.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

“He let the smoke drift around the inside of his mouth, trying to relax, but nothing could so easily dispel the unquiet that he felt.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

“A strange irony, Crott reflected, that the most base and lowly of London folk were the most honour-bound of all, and that the value of honour diminished in direct proportion to the heights of society a man climbed to.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

“Darkness, terrible cold darkness, the salty depths of the deepest oceans where no light warmed the rocks and the weight of the black water would crush a man like a grape.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

“They would erect great temples, and cities built of bone and sinew, and their foulness would spread like a cancer until finally, a hundred years from now, Mother Earth would be theirs.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

“Was it possible that he liked the world the way it was?”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray

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Popular quotes

“Heather Badcock meant no harm. She never did mean harm, but there is no doubt that people like Heather Badcock (and like my old friend Alison Wilde), are capable of doing a lot of harm because they lack - not kindness, they have kindness - but any real consideration for the way their actions may affect other people. She though always of what an action meant to her, never sparing a thought to what it might mean to somebody else.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side

“But I'll say this, if what looks like the facts of the matter are conflicting with your feelings, then you need more information before deciding”
― Tammara Webber, quote from Between the Lines

“Bad boys needed love too. Her boys weren’t dangerous— just naughty. But naughty could be very, very fun.”
― Marie Hall, quote from Her Mad Hatter

“But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright son has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.

Because they have no memory . . . because they are not human.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Benito Cereno

“After having denounced the absurdities of utopia, let us deal with its merits, and, since men accommodate
social arrangements so well and scarcely distinguish from them the evils immanent within them, let us do
as they do, let us unite ourselves with their unconsciousness.
We shall never praise the utopias sufficiently for having denounced the crimes of ownership, the
horror property represents, the calamities it causes. Great or small, the owner is corrupted, sullied in his essence: his corruption is projected onto the merest object he touches or appropriates. Whether his
“fortune” is threatened or stripped from him, he will be compelled to a consciousness of which he is
normally incapable. In order to reassume a human appearance, in order to regain his “soul,” he must be
ruined and must consent to his ruin. In this, the revolution will help him. By restoring him to his primal
nakedness, it annihilates him in the immediate future and saves him in the absolute, for it liberates—
inwardly, it is understood—those whom it strikes first: the haves; it reclassifies them, it restores to them
their former dimension and leads them back to the values they have betrayed. But even before having the
means or the occasion to strike them, the revolution sustains in them a salutary fear: it troubles their sleep,
nourishes their nightmares, and nightmare is the beginning of a metaphysical awakening. Hence it is as an
agent of destruction that the revolution is seen to be useful; however deadly, one thing always redeems it:
it alone knows what kind of terror to use in order to shake up this world of owners, the crudest of all
possible worlds. Every form of possession, let us not hesitate to insist, degrades, debases, flatters the
monster sleeping deep within each of us. To own even a broom, to count anything at all as our property, is
to participate in the general infamy. What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you—what a
revelation! You took yourself for the last of men, and now, suddenly, astonished and virtually enlightened
by your destitution, you no longer suffer from it; quite the contrary, you pride yourself in it. And all you
still desire is to be as indigent as a saint or a madman.”
― Emil M. Cioran, quote from History and Utopia

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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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