66 Quotes by Natasha Pulley

"Is it white wine? Red tastes like vinegar.''Of course it's white wine, I'm Japanese."

"I'll never understand. Advanced physics is about describing things you can't know intuitively, so you describe it in numbers, but I've got it in front of me." He was looking around the room rather than at her. He seemed to like it, and since coming in, had eased closer to the burners. "It's like listening to blind people with no sense of touch prove atom by atom the existence and possible features of an elephant when I'm not even very interested in elephants."

"Mori looked across and was, briefly, a languageless, inhuman thing rescued from the sea and asked for an impious favour."

"Think of horse races. People like to bet on the one with three legs and a wheeze.They don't bet on that one because they think it will win, but because they can see how very glorious it would be if it were to win"

"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."

"Mori smiled properly. The lines around his eyes were deeper than usual now. They made him look like an old photograph of a young man, often crushed, but ironed carefully so that only the ghosts of the marks remained."

"Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said 'do not walk on the grass', one hopped. Anybody who didn't had failed to understand what Oxford was."

"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."

"Under the gas lamps, mist pawed at the windows of the closed shops, which became steadily shabbier nearer home. It was such a smooth ruination that he could have been walking forward through time, watching the same buildings age five years with every step, all still as a museum"

"There was a cheer, and he took his first deep breath for months. He hadn't been aware of breathing shallowly. It had happened gradually; someone had put a penny on his chest every hour since November, and now the weight of thousands of pennies had lifted at once"