David Mitchell

As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.

At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind.

In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Old Rekohu__ claim to singularity, however, lay in its unique pacific creed. Since time immemorial, the Moriori__ priestly caste dictated that whosoever spilt a man__ blood killed his own mana - his honor, his worth, his standing & his soul. No Moriori would shelter, feed, converse with, or even see the persona non grata. If the ostracized murderer survived his first winter, the desperation of solitude usually drove him to a blowhole on Cape Young, where he took his life.Consider this, Mr. D__rnoq urged us. Two thousand savages (Mr. Evans__ best guess) enshrine __hou Shalt Not Kill_ in word & in deed & frame an oral __agna Carta_ to create a harmony unknown elsewhere for the sixty centuries since Adam first tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. War was as alien a concept to the Moriori as the telescope is to the Pygmy. Peace, not a hiatus betwixt wars but millennia of imperishable peace, rules these far-flung islands. Who can deny Old Rekohu lay closer to More__ Utopia than our States of Progress governed by war-hungry princelings in Versailles & Vienna, Washington & Westminster? __ere,_ declaimed Mr. D__rnoq, __nd where only, were those elusive phantasms, those noble savages, framed in flesh & blood!_ (Henry, as we later made our back to the Musket confessed, __ could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as __oble.

Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father__ generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don__ recall its name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.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__ architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer__ profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, __ook, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!__ow vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn__, the wolves and blizzards would be at one__ throat all the sooner.

I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head. No Jacob's ladder this, no, but rather Civilization's Ladder, if you will.

Orito banishes all thoughts of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet.

Your leaders must know powerful magic. Yes, said one of the women. The magic is called Marx, Stalin, Lenin and Class Dialectics. It didn't sound like very powerful magic to me.

Coffee__ the elixir of life.

They've given Harry the attributes of pistachio nuts and crack cocaine without the health risks (opening thousands of pistachio nuts can cause severe thumb-bruising, I can tell you from bitter experience of my life on the edge).

The sun was deaf'nin' so high up, yay, it roared an' time streamed from it.

Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.

it__ like the British in Ireland in 1916_ , says Oisir O__owd. __he repeated the ageless macho mantra, __orce is the only thing these natives understand,_ so often that they ended up believing it . From that point they were doomed.

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 west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.

Laughter is an anarchic blasphemy. Tyrants are wise to fear it.

At dawn the waves looked like mountain ranges tipped with gold as sunbeams slanted low under burgundy clouds.

All the supernatural yarns need a realist explanation and a supernatural one.

Loyalty looks simple... but it ain't.