66 Quotes by Natasha Pulley

"It is not summer, England doesn't have summer, it has continuous autumn with a fortnight's variation here and there."

"Thaniel wondered if real geisha painted themselves white so that it was harder to see how angry they must be all the time."

"Mori made an unwilling sound. 'I don't like Western art.''No look at this.' He lifted it from its package. It wasn't heavy. 'It's clever, it looks like busy Mozart.''What?''I . . .' Thaniel sighed. 'I see sound. Mozart looks like this. You know. Fast strings.''See? In front of you?''Yes. I'm not mad.''I didn't think so. All sounds?''Yes."

"No,"Ito said gently, "we will not be needing soldiers. Accountants will do nicely."Mutsuhito frowned. "How does one storm a castle with accountants ?""One buys it, sir."

"The creeping sense that he might have seen him reading the book came up from the ground, but that was more anxiety than evidence."

"It was the great evil of plays that every character had some kind of purpose. Absorb too much of them, and you could go about believing there was something wrong with you if you drifted unremarked towards your thirties, and coasted into a quiet beach of no interest to anyone."

"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."

"Nobody wants a house in Osaka,' he said, and it was strange to hear him switch suddenly to foreign pronunciation in the middle of his English. 'It would mean you had to live in Osaka.''What's wrong with it?' 'It's like . . . Birmingham."

"What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment."

"I'll give you a cake if you get him in the stream by the end of the afternoon,' Mori said to Six.'Hold on,' Thaniel said. 'No making criminals of the orphans, Fagin.''But I want some cake,' Six frowned. 'And his name isn't Fagin."