The Bedlam Stacks Quotes

What's gone before you, and what will come after,' I said instead. 'Beg pardon?' 'The past ahead. Time is like a river and you float with the current. Your ancestors set off before you did, so they're far ahead. Your descendants will sail it after.

It's good for a person to be terrorized by a goat. Hard to get high and mighty when there's something chasing you for vegetables

But Spanish and English aren't different languages, only extreme dialects of Latin. It's almost possible to translate word for word. Translation from a language unrelated to English is nothing to do with equivalent words. Whenever I'd tried to do that in Chinese I'd come out with unbroken nonsense. I had to forget the English, hang the meaning up in a well-lit gallery, stare at it hard, then describe it afresh.

Stop looking at it as an impossible thing and start looking at it as a thing that must be done.

I’ve forgotten a lot. If you go somewhere . . . very different to home, even for a long time, the memory feels like a dream when you get back.

Being mad isn't an excuse for being vague. Can we at least have specific madness?

Why do you hate Indians? You know white people are are much worse, don't you? It isn't as though there's some kind of international bar you're not reaching out here. We're terrible at everything. Lasting much past forty-five. Learning more than one language. It's a miracle, actually; sickly prematurely aging worryingly inbred horsey idiots have managed to convince everyone else their way is best by no other means than firmness of manner and the tactical distribution of flags. I can't believe no one's called our bluff yet.

In a shilling-spin of an instant I realised that he wasn’t a crude work but the ruin of something fine.

People are like bees. They’re all workers who could be queens, with the right stuff, but once a queen-making has begun, it can’t be reversed. A bee that’s halfway a queen can’t turn back into a worker. She’d starve. She must keep growing and then she must leave.

He laughed. It showed how he had been when he was younger. Mild-mannered and handsome. In a shilling-spin of an instant I realised that he wasn’t crude work but the ruin of something fine. The same as everything else here. I felt ashamed for not having noticed before. There was a knack to seeing how things had used to be but I’d never had it; I was no archaeologist. The new understanding lit up the edges of my mind and like always they were closer and more worn than I would have liked or thought.

What's the point of you?' 'I'm ornamental.' 'Sit down and don't touch anything.

I'd always thought it was gaudy, but standing there watching him beside the gold and glass shrine, I realised that his was a candlelight faith. It didn't work in the clear unforgiving light in London or Scandinavia, where even the dust in the cathedrals showed. But in the warm dimness and the shadows, what would have been tasteless at home made sense. The shrine looked like an oil painting made into real substance. So did he. England's was a reading religion, one it was difficult to understand at the bleak unimpressive first glance, one that needed books to explain itself. But his was images and images, the same as the old stages, in a place where not everyone could read and good light was expensive.

If you go somewhere . . . very different to home, even for a long time, the memory feels like a dream when you get back.

The border works both ways.

He looked worried, like he had just watched a boy flicking pebbles at something in a zoo with flimsy fences.

In bright light, with his hair turned that dark red and never having regained all the colour in his skin, he looked nationless.

Irony was a difficult thing to catch in a new language, and more so because not all languages had it, not even all local languages.

it’s yours until it makes an appearance in the world. It’s yours in the same way your liver is; you wouldn’t catch me telling you what to do or not do about that. I’d suggest not drinking heavily or taking a lot of opium, but you know.

I felt the way I did when I was about to dive into deep water. The last pause was to look for shadows that might be rocks. There were plenty that might have been, but nothing broke the surface and the more I looked the fewer there were.

All I could think was that the border was a clever idea. It might as well have been Hadrian's Wall, but they had taken the idea and distilled it down to all that was actually required of a wall in a perfectly policed world: a line on the ground.

People are like bees. They're all workers who could be queens, with the right stuff, but once a queen-making has begun, it can't be reversed. A bee that's half way a queen can't turn back into a worker. She'd starve. She must keep growing and then she must leave.

I didn’t say that I thought Clem was a bad translator, or that I didn’t believe there was any such thing as an impassable gulf in the thinking of two human beings. Of course you couldn’t translate everything, but you could damn well explicate, particularly if you both spoke such a sprawling monster of a language as English.

Raphael looked like he might have laughed if he'd been younger and more cheerful. 'Why are you using the Jesuit dictionary?' 'How do you know what I'm using? A d it's the only Quechua dictionary.' 'It's probably shrine,'I said, and then when Clem frowned, not understanding, 'not idol.' Raphael nodded to me and I smiled, because he was taking it so gently. I would have burst out laughing if someone had translated Christchurch as Heathen God Temple in front of me.

Christ, Minna, it's yours until it makes an appearance in the world. Its yours in the same way your liver is; you wouldn't catch me telling you what to do or not do about that.

It was hard to see how Clem could have spent so much time in countries like this but never noticed that success or failure depended on being a water boatman, skimming, instead of being a diver and getting everyone wet with an enormous splash whenever anything interesting passed through the deep water.

Our society seems something akin to an auditorium full of people holding drums. And the insanity inherent in this scene is that every person is clutching stacks of blank sheet music, no one knows what a metronome is, and none of these apparent musicians have a lick of musical experience. And in the deafening chaos of the acoustic bedlam that fills every corner of that room, every single person is voicing the incessant demand that everyone else in the room march to the beat of their own particular drum (even though they’re entirely uncertain as to what that beat is). And in the ensuing pandemonium, the beat that I’m going to march to is the one that marches me right out of that room.

I still couldn’t decide whether I should believe him or not. But I was too tired and too cold to argue, and for that moment at least I loved him for having made the idea of the funeral that bit less heavy, like he had put his shoulder under mine to share the weight.

Thank you,’ I said, feeling shabby and English in the falling-apart, ill-looking way English people always seem whenever you stand them next to someone from a healthier latitude.

Beyond was that open air and the looming blackness of the forest.

What’s gone before you, and what will come after,’ I said instead. ‘Beg pardon?’ ‘The past ahead. Time is like a river and you float with the current. Your ancestors set off before you did, so they’re far ahead. Your descendants will sail it after.

I looked without meaning to at the jagged black shape outline beyond the town in stars and had a stupid vision of a cave somewhere in those razor crags where the logic of everyone who had tried to take things from this place lay stacked in little glass boxes.

The devil could have roared at Sing and got nothing for his trouble but a newspaper in the face and a summary of the morning stock exchange.

There are things you wouldn’t do, if you had a motherless child waiting at home. Or with you. Places where you would turn back.

All I could think was that the border was a clever idea. It might as well have been Hadrian’s Wall, but they had taken the idea and distilled it down to all that was actually required of a wall in a perfectly policed world: a line on the ground. I wondered if it was perfectly policed.

but it was a Pyrrhic victory now it was here.

Lucky to see it,’ she said. ‘The forest must like Mr Markham. It’s very lucky for the quicksilver trees to cry at a funeral.

there were no feathers left, only a roasted carcass. He lifted it out of the water and tore off a leg. ‘It’s cooked, try it.’ ‘What . . . in God’s name was that?’ ‘It’s how they make glass eggs. They’re full of flammable chemicals and then when the time’s right . . .’ He opened his hand to mime an explosion. ‘But if you startle them they go off pretty well too.’ ‘They’re phoenixes.

Familiar devils are important after a while, though, aren’t they? Better than nothing,’ I said, and then shook my head. I could hear how incoherent I sounded but I couldn’t see a way to sort it