Cloud Atlas (novel)

"No organist played a Magnificat but the wind in the flue chimney, no choir sang a Nunc Dimittis but the withering gulls, yet I fancy the Creator was not displeazed."

"Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience."

"As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent."

"The very words "California Bound" are dusted in gold & beckon all men thitherwards like moths to a lantern."

"To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom."

"The better organized the state, the duller its humanity."

"That love loves fidelity [...] is a myth woven by men from their insecurities."

"People knelt in prayer, some moving their lips. Envy 'em, really I do. I envy God, too, privy to their secrets. Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street."

"Whoever opined "Money can't buy you happiness" obviously had far too much of the stuff."

"Et si vous nuisez à ma réputation, eh bien, il faudra que je ruine la vôtre!"

"Anything is true if enough people believe it is."

"...the dizzying vividness of the images of places and people that the letters have unlocked. Images so vivid she can only call them memories."

"They can extinguish awareness by dumbing down education, owning TV stations, paying "guest fees" to leader writers, or just buying the media up. The media—and not just The Washington Post—is where democracies conduct their civil wars."

"I became a scientist because... it's like panning for gold in a muddy torrent. Truth is the gold."

"Did I ever lie to get my story? Ten-mile-high whoppers every day before breakfast, if it got me one inch closer to the truth"

"This old man here reckons his colostomy bag entitles him to jump the queue," says the skinhead, "and make racist slurs about the lady of Afro-Caribbean extraction in the advance-travel window."

"You would think a place the size of England could easily hold all the happenings in one humble lifetime without much overlap–I mean, it's not ruddy Luxembourg we live in–but no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters."

"That autumn night long ago Ursula had served a blob of grilled cheese on a slice of shame on a breast of chicken. Righter there—right here. I could still taste it. I can taste it as I write these words."

"Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage."

"Your version of the truth is the only one that matters. Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths."

"Rumors ricocheted around the dome: a Yoona had kidnapped a boy, no, a baby; no, a pureblood had kidnapped a Yoona; an enforcer had shot a boy; no, a fabricant had hit the seer whose nose was bleeding. All the while, Papa Song surfed noodle waves on His Plinth."

"What is "poker"? A card game where abler liars take money off less able liars."

"You speak like an aesthete sometimes, Sonmi. Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively."

"Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror." I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to."

"[...] If losers can xploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term."

"Under the Enrichment Laws, consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depending on their strata. Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime."

"[...] the verb remember is outside servers' lexicons."

"I'm shoutin' back more'n forty long years at myself, yay, at Zachry the Niner, Oy, list'n! Times are you're weak 'gainst the world! Times are you can't do nothin'! That ain't your fault, it's this busted world's fault is all! But no matter how loud I shout, Boy Zachry, he don't hear me nor never will."

"[...] Smart'n'Civ'lize ain't nothin' to do with the color o' the skin, nay."

"Valleysmen only had one god an' her name it was Sonmi. Savages on Big I norm'ly had more gods'n you could wave a spiker at. [...] But for Valleysmen savage gods weren't worth knowin', nay, only Sonmi was real."

"Yay, Old Uns’ Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an' made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o' humans, yay, a hunger for more."

"Valleysmen'd not want to hear, she answered, that human hunger birthed the Civ'lize, but human hunger killed it too. I know it from other tribes offland what I stayed with. Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true."

"Then the true true is diff'rent to the seemin' true? said I. Yay, an' it usually is, I mem'ry Meronym sayin', an' that's why true true is presher'n'rarer'n diamonds."

"[...] ev'ry drumbeat one more life shedded off of me, yay, I glimpsed all the lives my soul ever was till far-far back b'fore the Fall,[...]"

"But ain't dyin' terrorsome cold if there ain't nothin' after? Yay—she sort o' laughed but not smilin', nay—our truth is terrorsome cold."

"List'n, savages an Civ'lizeds ain't divvied by tribes or b'liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev'ry human is both, yay. Old Uns'd got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals, an' that's what tripped the Fall. Some Savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ'lized heart beatin' in their ribs. Maybe some Kona. Not 'nuff to sayso their hole tribe, but who knows one day? One day. "One day" was only a flea o' hope for us. Yay, I mem'ry Meronym sayin', but fleas ain't easy to rid."

"I watched clouds awobbly from the floor o' that kayak. Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds."

"Travel far enough, you meet yourself."

"A Soul's value is the dollars therein."

"Fantasy. Lunacy. All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities."

"Unanimity would maintain order. Enforcers aren't all Union agents. Even Yoona~939 chose death over slavery."

"He said the giant was a deity that offered salvation from a meaningless cycle of birth and rebirth, and perhaps the cracked stonework still possessed a lingering divinity."

"What you describe is beyond the... conceivable, Sonmi~451. Murdering fabricants to supply dineries with food and Soap... no. The charge is preposterous, no, it's unconscionable, no it's blasphemy! As an Archivist I can't deny that you saw what you believe you saw, but as a consumer of the corpocracy, I am impelled to say, what you saw must, must, have been a Union... set, created for your benefit. No such... "slaughtership" could possibly be permitted to xist. The Beloved Chairman would never permit it! The Juche would ionize Papa Song's entire exec strata in the Litehouse! If fabricants weren't paid for their labor in retirement communities, the whole pyramid would be... the foulest perfidy. Business is business."

"[...] in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights," the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful."

"Many xpert witnesses at. our trial denied Declarations could be the work of a fabricant, ascended or otherwise, and maintained it was ghosted by Union or a pureblood Abolitionst. How lazily "xperts" dismiss what they fail to understand."

"Memories refused to fit, or fitted but came unglued. Even months later, how would I know if some major tranche of myself remained lost?"

"The ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, "But it's been done a hundred times before!"—as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!"

"We–by whom I mean anyone over sixty—commit two offenses just bu existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drugs barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offense is being Everyman's memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight."

"Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, according to Veronica, its victory is assured."

"Patience's design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins. How pointless is that?"