M. john harrison Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: M. John Harrison
Quotes of Author: M. John Harrison

M. John Harrison _ Viriconium Nights
The first time we spoke, Mr. Ambraysas told me, 'Identity is not negotiable. An identity you have achieved by agreement is always a prison.
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M. John Harrison _ The Pastel City
He ran toward the light. When he passed the corpse of his dead friend, he began to weep again. He picked up his sword. He tried to smash a crystal window with its hilt. The corridor oppressed him. Beyond the windows, the dead brains drifted. He ran on.'You should have done it,'whispered Birkin Grif in the soft spaces of his skull; and, 'OUROBUNDOS!'giggled the insane door, as he fell through it and in to the desert wind. His cloak cracking and whipping about him, so that he resembled a crow with broken wings, he stumbled toward the black air-boat. His mind mocked him. His face was wet.He threw himself into the command-bridge. Green light swam about him, and the dead Northmen stared blindly at him as he turned on the power. He did not choose a direction, it chose him. Under full acceleration, he fled out into the empty sky.
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M. John Harrison _ The Pastel City
At Birkin Grif's left, his seat insecure on a scruffy packhorse, Theomeris Glyn, his only armour a steel-stressed leather cap, grumbled at the cold and the earliness of the hour, and cursed the flint hearts of city girls.
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M. John Harrison _ Things That Never Happen
The true detective {...} starts in the center of the maze. Crimes make their way through to him. Never forget: you uncover your heart at the heart of it.
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M. John Harrison _ Viriconium
He was, and always had been, the repository of more fears than hopes.
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M. John Harrison _ A Storm of Wings
Some internal process held him rapt. He had begun, perhaps, to map the paths inside himself which led to the Past. This gave him an absentminded air, and an irritable one, as if by our presence we interrupted some private conversation--although had anyone suggested this he would have rejected it angrily. Attempting to live simultaneously in two worlds, he rode moodily ahead and seemed to see nothing--head bowed into rain, blood-red armour pulsing like a beacon. If it was madness then it was only the madness that has infected all his people since their Rebirth. They will learn in the end that the journey they long for is impossible, and accept the world as it is.
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M. John Harrison _ The 4th Domain
People try to help, but all they have to work with is their theory of you. In the end they're talking to themselves.
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M. John Harrison _ Viriconium
She has never made up her mind between public acclaim-which she sees, rightly or wrongly, as destructive of the true artistic impulse-and obscurity, for which she is not temperamentally fitted.
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M. John Harrison _ The Pastel City
The right fist rested on the pommel of his plain long sword, which, contrary to the fashion of the time, had no name. Cromis, whose lips were thin and bloodless, was more possessed by the essential qualities of things than by their names; concerned with the reality of Reality, rather than with the names men give it.
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M. John Harrison _ Viriconium
Before I came to the city I cut off my hair. It was the first of many fatally symbolic gestures.
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M. John Harrison _ Viriconium
But it wasn't until much later that I learned the sad facts of his death or the sadder ones of his life. By then I could be found in the pavement cafés of Sour Bridge, with a set of my own.
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M. John Harrison _ The Pastel City
The momentum of the charge carried Cromis twenty yards into the press without the need to strike a blow: Northmen fell to the hooves and shoulders of his horse and were trampled. He shouted obscenities at them, and made for the knoll, the smugglers a flying wedge behind him. A pikeman tore a long strip of flesh from the neck of his mount; Cromis hung out of the saddle and swung for the carotid artery; blade bit, and splashed with the piker's gore the horse reared and screamed in triumph. Cromis hung on and cut about him, laughing. The stink of horse-sweat and leather and blood was as sharp as a knife.
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