Jonathan Sims Quotes

He considered himself a good man, and always did his best to avoid passing judgement on others, but deep down he had an unshakeable conviction that all rich people were deeply, deeply stupid.

This world was designed to generate winners and losers, and it showed a lack of character to wish yourselves a winner without accepting what it does to those who lose.

To Violet, the greatest danger of eye contact was that people thought you were interested in their opinions.

Sorry Elias, I can't hear you, there’s a door in the way.

She was fine. There was no reason for her not to be, so she was fine.

Maybe we're all just broken inside. Unable to really grasp the difference between fictional people and people we just don't know. They're all just abstract ideas we're happy to have suffer for our enjoyment.

I was going to say 'my friend Stuart', but I suppose he's not a friend any more. I seem to have lost a number of friends in the last few years. I don't mean that I've fallen out with them, in any dramatic way. We've just decided not to stay in touch. And that's what it's been: a decision, a conscious decision, because it's not difficult to stay in touch with people nowadays, there are so many different ways of doing it. But as you get older, I think that some friendships start to feel increasingly redundant. You just find yourself asking, "What's the point?" And then you stop.

Bodies are strange. Rather glad they're not my concern anymore." "Must be nice." "It really is.

What good’s being alone if you don’t know how alone you truly are?

There is nothing in the world more reassuring than ignorance, which we can mistake for certainty.

The more I listen, the more it seems to me we’re all just – groping about, trying desperately to find out what we’re actually meant to be doing.

Free of what? We all have forces that drive us, circumstances that direct us, and even if we choose to ignore these and act against all logic, just to prove that we can – is that not simply allowing the existential terror of our own powerlessness to control us instead?

Gonna be honest. A rich man suffering consequences sounds a lot less plausible to me than ghosts.

Nothing worth doing should be easy, she had always felt, and that included living.

Well, sometimes the helping people hurts. Sure, but that doesn’t mean everything painful helps.

Jumping on a grenade is only heroic if you weren’t the one who actually threw it.

Right, well. If I’m just another cog, maybe I can’t leave the machine, but from this moment I’m not turning. I’m jammed.

Though her mother's dire predictions of robbery, murder or kidnapping had never come true (yet another way Violet had disappointed her), she had been right about how harsh and ugly London was. If you couldn't find the quiet joy in that ugliness, it might be a bit much for some people.

Nice to see Gertrude also used to get a lot of threats. So far, it doesn’t seem that any of them went desperately well, except for Elias, of course, but he didn’t threaten, did he, just...did it.

You're right, Margaret, absolutely right. Things have changed a lot, even since I've been here. It's a different place now. Better in some ways, worse in others." "Better!" she echoed, scornfully.

Le auto sono come le persone. Ogni giorno andiamo in giro in mezzo alla ressa, corriamo di qua e di là, arrivando quasi a toccarci ma in realtà c'è pochissimo contatto. Tutti quegli scontri mancati. Tutte quelle opportunità perse. E' inquietante, a pensarci bene. Forse è meglio non pensarci affatto

As for human contact, I'd lost all appetite for it. Mankind has, as you may have noticed, become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid talking to each other and I'd been taking full advantage of the most recent ones. I would always send a text message rather than speak to someone on the phone. Rather than meeting with any of my friends, I would post cheerful, ironically worded status updates on Facebook, to show them all what a busy life I was leading. And presumably people had been enjoying them, because I'd got more than seventy friends on Facebook now, most of them complete strangers. But actual, face-to-face, let's-meet-for-a-coffee-and-catch-up sort of contact? I seemed to have forgotten what that was all about.

Some of the smartest people there were also the most committed. Intelligence doesn’t make you less prone to taking on bad ideas, it just makes you better at defending them to other people and to yourself. Smart people can believe some truly ridiculous things, and then deploy all the reason and logic at their disposal to justify them, because a belief doesn’t begin in your mind. It begins in your feelings.

We do not disappear after death. Small pieces of our being can remain, persisting in those places that were once so meaningful to us.

The moment that you die will feel exactly the same as this one.

Hello Jon, Apologies For The Deception.

I am not a “who,” Archivist, I am a “what.” A “who” requires a degree of identity I can’t ever retain.

His origins were similar to any other billionaire: he was provided with a small fortune by his father’s family

At a certain point, beyond all extremity, the only freedom you have left is the freedom to say ‘No’ and let them do as they will

The ghosts were never the problem

I was… so sure I’d find something up there. But instead it was just another broken person trying to come to terms with the wreckage of their life.

 I have always believed that the key to manipulating people is to ensure that they always under- or over-estimate you. Never reveal your true abilities or plans.

Sometimes people have problems that will wreck you long before you can make a dent in them, and some people don’t want help, they just want other people suffering with them.

It’s easy to pass judgment from the outside. One more reason to stay on the outside and watch.

Maybe. Look, life forces you to make hard decisions, but I can never trust someone who goes around looking for hard decisions to make.

Doesn’t even need to tell you any lies – just waits for the lies you tell yourself.

Is that your first question? …is there a limit? Only until I get bored. And that does tend to come more quickly these days.

My family were blandly supportive to the point of uselessness. Oh, they had plenty of soothing platitudes, but platitudes wouldn’t get me back 20 years.

Do you have any idea how much damage you can do if you’re a police officer who wants to hurt people? How much the system will protect you?

The only reason this one feels special is because it's happening to you

After all, the larger the space you find yourself alone in, the more isolated you feel. And being aware of how lonely you are (dry laugh) can make anywhere feel more empty.

Why do you do that? Do what? Push the sceptic thing so hard!? I mean, it made sense at first, but now? After everything we’ve seen, after everything you’ve read! I hear you recording statements and y-you just dismiss them. You tear them to pieces like they’re wasting your time, but half of the “rational” explanations you give are actually more far-fetched than just accepting it was a, a ghost or something. I mean for god’s sake John, we’re literally hiding from some kind of worm… queen… thing, how, how could you possibly still not believe!? Of course, I believe. Of course I do. Have you ever taken a look at the stuff we have in Artefact Storage? That’s enough to convince anyone. But, but even before that… Why do you think I started working here? It’s not exactly glamorous. I have… I’ve always believed in the supernatural. Within reason. I mean. I still think most of the statements down here aren’t real. Of the hundreds I’ve recorded, we’ve had maybe… thirty, forty that are… that go on tape. Now, those, I believe, at least for the most part. Then why do you – Because I’m scared, Martin!. Because when I record these statements it feels… it feels like I’m being watched. I… I lose myself a bit. And then when I come back, it’s like… like if I admit there may be any truth to it, whatever’s watching will… know somehow. The skepticism, feigning ignorance. It just felt safer.

There was something about the long stretch of train ride rattling out towards the suburbs and countryside that he found strangely oppressive. The same landmarks passing him by every day, again and again, marking the passage of time between a deeply unfulfilling job and a house his parents were clearly sick of sharing with him. A huge pendulum, back and forth, each swing another tally on a wasted life he’d never get back.

Cults are very good at finding you when you’re at your lowest point, when you’re your most emotionally vulnerable. And when you’re at that point it’s astounding what can crawl into your heart and start to fester there.

Scans show decisions are made by your brain long before your conscious mind even has a chance to register them. Most of one’s life is simply spent looking back and convincing yourself that you chose deliberately to act like you did.

Ему вдруг пришло в голову, что он движется по жизни как во сне и когда-нибудь (лет этак через тридцать) он проснется лишь затем, чтобы увидеть: его время на этой земле подошло к концу, а он не успел уразуметь и малой толики происходящего.

These things that – loom so large over our lives trap us and push us and – sometimes kill us. But they never actually tell us what we’re supposed to be doing. So we scheme and we plot, lash out at each other without ever really knowing why.

We do spend a lot of time together. It’s not that easy though. When everyone has so many walls, so many defenses, sometimes you can feel lonely even when you’re all in the same room. But it’s better than the alternative and at least none of us are suffering alone.

Os carros são como as pessoas. Movemo-nos em círculos todos os dias, corremos daqui para ali, passamos a centímetros uns dos outros, mas há muito pouco contacto real. Tantos desencontros. Tantos «podia ter sido». É assustador, quando pensamos nisso. Provavelmente, o melhor é não pensar.

Everyone thinks they’re too smart to get involved in a cult. I’m sure you do. You think that, of the first mention of aliens, or the end of the world, or the lost book of the Bible where Jesus buried his holy staff in the foothills of the Himalayas, you’d go running. Trouble is, that misunderstands how it works

The beautiful woman in blood-stained jewels looked away, searching for a seat. She should hate her for the trophies she wore of slavery and death, but somewhere beneath her new callouses, she found that she couldn’t. Something else, deeper than the weariness and dirt, grew brighter at the sight, cutting through her anger.

Cinematographer.” Such an ornate term, yet still so vague. I often wonder if that’s to blame for how overlooked we are as a profession. Or even worse, that dry title, “Director of Photography.” But we are the true artists. A director may quite literally call the shots, but it is the cinematographer that makes them. We choose the angles, the lighting, pretty much everything that you see on the screen. The camera is a brush, and we are the hand, the arm, the eye. The director’s basically just the mouth, making pointless noise while the hand does the actual work. Almost every famous director that you know who has a distinctive visual style has simply managed to lock down a talented DoP.

Hm. Have you ever read War and Peace, John? I know, I know; I had to read an extract for a literature class once, ended up reading the whole thing It’s not actually as boring as people say, and its central thesis is that the tiniest, most insignificant factors can control the destiny of the world. In its post-script, Tolstoy muses on the concept of free will, on whether or not he really believes in it. He ultimately decides that if all the millions upon millions of factors that weigh upon our choices were fully and completely known, then all could be foreseen and predetermined. But, he argues, it is quite impossible for the human mind to comprehend even a fraction of these. And in that vast, dark space of ignorance lies: free will. Isn’t that marvelous, John? Free will is simply ignorance. It’s just the name we give to the fact that no one can ever really see everything that controls them. Of course, that’s not the real crux of the free will question that’s bothering you at the moment, is it? I think that one probably comes down to whether or not you’re choosing to continue reading this statement out loud.

Martin." Sims said. "Jon." Blackwood said. "Tim." Tim said. They all looked at him. "Oh, sorry, I thought we were saying names." Sims grinned, shaking his head. "Never change, Tim." Tim shot him finger guns. "You got it, boss.

We do not disappear after death. Small pieces of our being can remain, persisting in those places that were once so meaningful to us. These traces can be found where we lived or loved or worked, and will linger especially where we died. They stand as a testament to a life; stubborn reminders that call out to those who know how to spot them and scream I was here! I will not be forgotten!

the greatest danger of eye contact was that people thought you were interested in their opinions.

People are always so surprised at what they are capable of once they’ve taken a step they deem unforgivable.

But anything could be beautiful. Beauty was cheap. Beauty was obvious.

So what can we generalize about Victorian vampires? They are already dead, yet not exactly dead, and clammy-handed. They can be magnetically repelled by crucifixes and they don’t show up in mirrors. No one is safe; vampires prey upon strangers, family, and lovers. Unlike zombies, vampires are individualists, seldom traveling in packs and never en masse. Many suffer from mortuary halitosis despite our reasonable expectation that they would no longer breathe. But our vampires herein also differ in interesting ways. Some fear sunlight; others do not. Many are bound by a supernatural edict that forbids them to enter a home without some kind of invitation, no matter how innocently mistaken. Dracula, for example, greets Jonathan Harker with this creepy exclamation that underlines another recurring theme, the betrayal of innocence (and also explains why I chose Stoker’s story “Dracula’s Guest” as the title of this anthology): “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will.” Yet other vampires seem immune to this hospitality prohibition. One common bit of folklore was that you ought never to refer to a suspected vampire by name, yet in some tales people do so without consequence. Contrary to their later presentation in movies and television, not all Victorian vampires are charming or handsome or beautiful. Some are gruesome. Some are fiends wallowing in satanic bacchanal and others merely contagious victims of fate, à la Typhoid Mary. A few, in fact, are almost sympathetic figures, like the hero of a Greek epic who suffers the anger of the gods. Curious bits of other similar folklore pop up in scattered places. Vampires in many cultures, for example, are said to be allergic to garlic. Over the centuries, this aromatic herb has become associated with sorcerers and even with the devil himself. It protected Odysseus from Circe’s spells. In Islamic folklore, garlic springs up from Satan’s first step outside the Garden of Eden and onion from his second. Garlic has become as important in vampire defense as it is in Italian cooking. If, after refilling your necklace sachet and outlining your window frames, you have some left over, you can even use garlic to guard your pets or livestock—although animals luxuriate in soullessness and thus appeal less to the undead. The vampire story as we know it was born in the early nineteenth century. As

Save some pity for the Misfit, fighting on with bursting heart; Not a trace of common sense, his is no common flight. Save, save him some pity. But save the greater part For him that sees no glimmer of the Misfit's guiding light.

I am not a brave man. I believe I am starting to come to terms with that fact, but I am, in certain circumstances, a very stubborn one.

So what? I don’t get to be angry? I don’t get to burn things? Just, just run around, making tea, while everyone else gets to actually have feelings?

But you think sometimes about what the real world is. Just what your brain mixes together from what your senses tell you. We create the world in a lot of ways. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that, when we’re not being careful, we can change it.

Despite his dread, it takes only a moment for him to make his decision. He reaches out with his other arm and feels it gripped by another hand as slowly, inexorably, he allows himself to be pulled back into the great, suffering colossus. Far below, there is another impact –