66 Quotes by Natasha Pulley

Being mad isn’t an excuse for being vague. Can we at least have specific madness?

In Japan, first names are only for who you’re married to, or if you’re being rude,′ the watchmaker explained.

When a sign says don’t walk on the grass, one hops.’ He.

He was from Glasgow. Everything past “good morning” was a blur.

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.

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.

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.

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

People are like bees. They’re all workers who could be queens, with the right stuff, but once a queen-making has begun, it can’t be reversed. A bee that’s halfway a queen can’t turn back into a worker. She’d starve. She must keep growing and then she must leave.