38 Quotes by Lavie Tidhar

Pawns are such fascinating pieces, too...So small, almost insignificant, and yet--they can depose kings. Don't you find that interesting?

They were all machines, he thought, just like La Mettrie had said in L'Homme Machine all those years ago. So he, Orphan, was a machine of flesh and blood, and Lucy, now, was made of something else, more complex perhaps- but they were the same and...They were in love.Sometimes that was enough.

...this is something out of a bad novel, before the Revolution happened, before a man called Hitler rose to power and rewrote the world like a lurid paperback.

But it was not real freedom, he realised. It was the freedom that comes from lack of choice and moreover, was the kind that only came with decisions delayed. It was a freedom of inaction.

It is, perhaps, the prerogative of every man or woman to imagine, and thus force a shape, a meaning, onto that wild and meandering narrative of their lives, by choosing genre. A princess is rescued by a prince; a vampire stalks a victim in the dark; a student becomes a master. A circle is completed. An so on.

Joe wished it had all been just a dream. To think of planes crashing into impossibly-tall towers, of bombs taking out eyes and teeth and fingers, of a silent, secret war he didn’t understand, was to think of fiction, a cheap paperback thriller with a lurid cover. There was – there could be – nothing real about such things.

Clocks are the enemies of time... they are the gaolers of day and the turnkeys of night."Tom Thumb

I have a lot of time to think. To look at the strands of the past weave themselves into the knots of the present, and to imagine how the future might unfold from them. So many possibilities. Like a game of chess. And you, my little pawn, you are the catalyst, walking through the board one small step at a time, towards...what? What sort of endgame will you bring us all, Orphan?

Life isn't a pulp novel, Joe, and death isn't either.