Contact
Privacy
Book: Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence
Quotes of Book: Hannah Green and Her
TOP TAGS :confirmation-biasinterculturalhumanitarianismella-shepardtombstonesphysiciansinstructionsboredom

  1. Michael Marshall Smith _ Hannah Green and Her

    you have become all the things you have done and thought, and now can't undo or unthink.
    book-quote

  2. Michael Marshall Smith _ Hannah Green and Her

    We all serve the fates. Life will happen to us come what may. Not everyone gets to be a grandparent, but we're all someone's grandchild. We have no choice therefore but to carry someone else's weight, enacting their long-ago choices and duties of care. There's no point blaming others for what happens next, however: responsibility for shaping and unearthing our stories, following the bouncing squirrel of our destinies, lies with us alone. Our victories and losses, our gains and lacks, the challenges we decline and those we accept - all resonate through the generations that follow. ....Nothing ever ends, and no one truly dies.
    book-quote

  3. Michael Marshall Smith _ Hannah Green and Her

    Well. it's all been interesting,' Hannah declared, standing to leave. 'But if I'm honest, I'd prefer my life to be a lot more mundane from now on.
    book-quote

  4. Michael Marshall Smith _ Hannah Green and Her

    I was a circumstance, Hannah, that's all. Good or bad - and I assure you that I remain extremely and appallingly bad - there are many angels because there were once many gods, pushing, pulling, hiding, guiding. Once we get through the fog and find a place that feels comfortable we look back and call their influence fate, and the destination our destiny. That's all.
    book-quote

  5. Michael Marshall Smith _ Hannah Green and Her

    Never ask questions if you might not want to know the answers, lest you are pulled into those stories and the truths they reveal. Sometimes ignorance is better. It would probably not be so popular otherwise.
    book-quote

  6. Michael Marshall Smith _ Hannah Green and Her

    People stopped knowing how to behave, and most of all they stopped remembering . They needed reasons to toe the line, and that was what they were given. Two reasons. Heaven, and Hell. Equal in resonance and moment. No one will ever be able to tell whether it has been the promise of Heaven or the threat of Hell that has kept this world from teetering into chaos ten thousand times. is why Hell matters, and that's why the power of black deeds must always be directed there. Without evil there is no good, and without Hell's focusing lens there can be no true evil - just a great deal of extremely poor behaviour.
    book-quote

  7. Michael Marshall Smith _ Hannah Green and Her

    Parents hear those words more often than anyone, and always from those they love the most. Families are the crucibles that temper the toughest of love's swords. It gets intense in there sometimes. You know you're going to get slapped with those words sooner or later, when the little person in your charge glares hot-eyed up at you and flexes their soul. You'll joke about it with your partner before it happens, how someday this bundle of dependency will carve off sufficient autonomy to stab you with the cutting words. You figure it'll be in their teens, but in fact it starts a lot earlier. Kids are leaving you from the day they're born. They have their pens in their hands and start making marks on their own sheets of paper, their first words and sentences, their personal Chapter One. It's shocking to have those words hurled at you, but you come to take them for the spasm of frustration or low blood sugar they usually are.
    book-quote

  8. Michael Marshall Smith _ Hannah Green and Her

    There is no beginning. We are always in the middle.
    book-quote

  9. Michael Marshall Smith _ Hannah Green and Her

    In your twenties you unquestioningly believe you're writing in pencil, a striking first draft. You do things with such confidence. You know you're so strong, so individual, wholly unique: that you have power over heaven and earth, and that the future and its wonders are either already in your hands or will be after you do the next thing, or the thing that follows naturally after that. And so you bravely pick up the existential pencil and sketch a few opening sentences, the speculative first paragraph. You encourage the woman or man you love to write alongside you, relishing the co-authoring of this huge improvisational adventure, this big and beautiful game. You write and write and write and it all seems so very easy, and before you know it you're already on Chapter Sixteen and that's great because just how much you've done, and how very good it is . . . or will be, definitely, when you've had a chance to give it an edit. Until the lunch in Los Gatos when you realize there will no second draft, that your wife doesn't love you any more, and you've been writing with indelible ink all along.
    book-quote

  10. Michael Marshall Smith _ Hannah Green and Her

    Imagine, if you will, a watchmaker's workshop. In fact, please imagine one whether you wish to or not.
    book-quote

  11. Michael Marshall Smith _ Hannah Green and Her

    Erik left the church and walked back out through the streets. The people coursing through them did not frighten him any more because he realized their movements and the sound of their thousand voices were notes in a vast piece of music, a story made of sounds, sometimes dissonant - like the shouts of men trying to sell bits of meat, or old, rusty tools - and at others sweet and pure, like mothers fondly calling their children, or greeting their neighbours. What he'd heard in the church, along with the realization that these things did not just come out of the mind of God, but could be born in the fingers of men, changed him forever.
    book-quote

  12. Michael Marshall Smith _ Hannah Green and Her

    Almost every story in the world has a back door through which the Devil can enter if he so chooses.
    book-quote
Categories