"Cloud Atlas"

[fiefoe]

The title of the book has put me off for so long! And it turns out to be a satisfying and exciting read. The nesting doll structure is a vast improvement over the handful of lint in "If On a Winter's Night a Traveller", and Mitchell's reputation for ventriloquism is well earned.

• this Arcadian strand was a cannibals’ banqueting hall, yes, where the strong engorged themselves on the weak. The teeth, they spat out, as you or I would expel cherry stones.
• Indeed, one valued import from New Zealand is the accurate time).
• Since time immemorial, the Moriori’s priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man’s blood killed his own mana—his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul.
• Glass & peace alike betray proof of fragility under repeated blows.
• Whalers’ cats & rats bred like the Plagues of Egypt & ate the burrow-nesting birds whose eggs the Moriori so valued for sustenance.
• The Maori proved themselves apt pupils of the English in “the dark arts of colonization.”
• What moral to draw? Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.
• said the Maori had performed the White Man a service by exterminating another race of brutes to make space for us, adding that Russians train Kossacks to “soften Siberian hides” in a similar way.
• 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.
• whales turned to islets of gore, then barrels of sperm oil;
• “Frankly, sir, he loathed me.” As you’ve learned to your cost, I can be intriguing when I put my mind to it.
• Whiskered mandarin ducks honk for bread, exquisitely tailored beggars—rather like myself.
• An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton. Watched the aerial bliss of coupled dragonflies. Even heard their wings, an ecstatic sound like paper flaps in bicycle spokes.
• Waited until I was sure my voice was purged of relief and told him, nobly, nothing was wrong in speaking his mind.
• Keats. He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine.
• this Adam Ewing? A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.
• Honeysuckle laces abundant light.
• farmers are worried about the harvest, but show me a placid farmer and I’ll show you a sane conductor.
• 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 again.
• Bedroom farce, when it actually happens, is intensely sad.
• To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests.
• 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.
• In the smoky firelight the two old men nodded off like a pair of ancient kings passing the aeons in their tumuli. Made a musical notation of their snores. Elgar is to be played by a bass tuba, Ayrs a bassoon.
• East, our denuded, heroic, pernicious, enshrined, thirsty, berserking American continent.
• a Baptist ex–naval nuclear engineer from Atlanta called James Carter, who plans to run for the Democratic nomination.
• “The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance.
• The room bubbles with sentences more spoken than listened to.
• Finch wouldn’t have been a critic if he didn’t love unearned attention.
• feted by people who until then had never so much as paused to scrape me off their shoes.
• Translation rights fell like territories in the final round of Risk.
• moral muggings from charity fund-raisers /  (“Memory Serves.” Duplicitous couplet.)
• leaving me and a couple of taxidermist’s castoffs to limp in their wake at quarter speed.
• 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.
• Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.
• all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don’t, will is pitted against will. “Admire me, for I am a metaphor.”
• A howling singer on the radio strummed a song about how everything that dies someday comes back.
• Humor is the ovum of dissent, and the Juche should fear it.
• A dinery is not a hermetic world: every prison has jailers and walls. Jailers are ducts and walls conduct.
• Ascension creates a hunger sharp enough to consume the subject’s sanity, in time. In consumers, this state is termed chronic depression.
• further attraction: as a newly created stemtype, they drew queues of fabricant spotters.
• Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, yes, and their greenness, still mesmerize me.
• Wing027’s xplanation of deadlands appalled me, but the disasterman anticipated their approach with relish. The day when all Nea SoCopros is deadlanded, he told me, will be the day fabricants become the new purebloods.
• My mind fumbled with such enormity and dropped it; / We are only what we know
• fury forges will. / Snow is bruised lilac in half-lite: such pure solace.
• SeedCorp was the lunar sponsor that nite. The immense lunar projector on far-off Fuji beamed AdV after AdV onto the moon’s face.
• Time is the speed at which the past decays, but disneys enable a brief resurrection.