Here are some of my favorite sentences from David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas,” a nesting-doll of stories and characters that proved to me yet again (not sure why I continue in my disbelief) that not all great writers are old, dead, or Russian.
A challenging read at times, but one fully worth the effort. Mitchell manages to weave six separate stories together from various geographies and time periods without coming off as hokey or desperate. This book has a Narnian-sorcery to it (those sly Brits) that pulls you in and allows your imagination to run. Highly recommend.
“I cried and watched the girl gallop off until she was a miniature in the Van Dyck pastoral.”
“We toasted Bacchus and the Muses, and drank a wine rich as unicorn’s blood.”
“Old, blind, as sick as Ayrs is, he could hold his own in a college debating society, though I notice he rarely proposes alternatives for the systems he ridicules. ’Liberality? Timidity in the rich!’ ‘Socialism? The younger brother of a decrepit despotism, which it wants to succeed.’ ’Conservatives? Adventitious liars, whose doctrine of free will is their greatest deception.’ What sort of state does he want? ’None! The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.’”
“One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.”
“Houses like these secrete some dark sorcery that transforms their owners into fruitcakes.”
“Commuters, these hapless souls who enter a lottery of death twice daily on Britain’s decrepit railways, packed the dirty train. Airplanes circled in holding patterns over Heathrow, densely as gnats over a summer puddle. Too much matter in this ruddy city.”
“The cold sank its fangs into my exposed neck and frisked me for uninsulated patches.”
“Ah, mountain stars are not these apologetic pinpricks over conurb skies; hanging plump they drip lite.”
“Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”
“Ernie Blacksmith was the kind of quiet man you notice at a second glance.”
“Poor England. Too much history for its acreage. Years grow inwards here, like my toenails.”
“Three or four times in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides…I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.”
“Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules, only outcomes.”
“In an individual selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.”
“Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.”
“A life spent shaping the world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.”
“‘He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!’ Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”
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