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Book: Things That Never Happen
Quotes of Book: Things That Never Happen

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 _ Things That Never Happen
Write something about me then,' he said when I came back. He grinned. 'Go on! Now! I bet you can!' 'I don't do portraits, Choe.' The lies liberated from this statement skittered off into infinity like images between two mirrors.
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M. John Harrison _ Things That Never Happen
...in the morning -- 'When the world looks promising again despite what we know about it' -- ...
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M. John Harrison _ Things That Never Happen
A gull planed steeply over their heads, a precarious flash of white against the windy blue sky. The short, hacking cry of a baby seemed to merge seamlessly for a moment with the gull's repetitive wail, as if they were one species. One species, Falkender thought, raucous and scavenging; one species calling out in pain. To be human is to be mixed and miscegenated like this. To be lost.
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M. John Harrison _ Things That Never Happen
Everyone loves a mysterious country.
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M. John Harrison _ Things That Never Happen
Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can.
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M. John Harrison _ Things That Never Happen
He was lonely; I wanted to help, of course, but not from so intimate a distance; and lately our meetings had become memorable as a series of comically protracted farewells on station platforms and embarrassed, hasty protestations of friendship made through the windows of departing taxicabs.
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M. John Harrison _ Things That Never Happen
You can't cure people of their character,' she read. After this he had crossed something out then gone on, 'You can't even change yourself. Experiments in that direction soon deteriorate into bitter, infuriated struggles. You haul yourself over the wall and glimpse new country. Good! You can never again be what you were! But even as you are congratulating yourself you discover tied to one leg the string of Christmas cards, gas bills, air letters and family snaps which will never allow you to be anyone else. A forty-year-old woman holds up a doll she has kept in a cardboard box under a bed since she was a child. She touches its clothes, which are falling to pieces; works tenderly its loose arm. The expression that trembles on the edge of realizing itself in the slackening muscles of her lips and jaw is indescribably sad. How are you to explain to her that she has lost nothing by living the intervening years of her life? How is she to explain that to you?
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M. John Harrison _ Things That Never Happen
After all why should our goal be the reinstatement of an illusory 'exact' relationship between events and words? If you probe in the ashes you will never learn anything about the fire: by the time the ashes can be handled the meaning has passed on. Every adventure is a cup so empty it can be drunk from again and again and again. Every adventure is so perfect it verges on silence.
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M. John Harrison _ Things That Never Happen
Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.
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M. John Harrison _ Things That Never Happen
Egnaro is a secret known to everyone but yourself.It is a country or a city to which you have never been; it is an unknown language. At the same time it is like being cuckolded, or plotted against. It is part of the universe of events which will never wholly reveal itself to you: a conspiracy the barest outline of which, once visible, will gall you forever.
book-quote paranoia
M. John Harrison _ Things That Never Happen
Identity is not negotiable. An identity you have achieved by agreement is always a prison."
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