Best 27 quotes of Natasha Pulley on MyQuotes

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.

Being solitary isn't a disease that needs a cure.

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.

Englishmen were rained on too often to come up with anything that imaginative.

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.

He was not poor - he could afford ten candles & two baths a week. He wasn't going to throw himself in the Thames for the misery of it all and God knew most of London was worse off. All the same, he had a feeling life should not have been about ten candles and two baths a week.

If you go somewhere . . . very different to home, even for a long time, the memory feels like a dream when you get back.

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.

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.

I'm a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don't.

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

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

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

Loyalty is a continuous phenomenon, you don't score points for past action,

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 half way a queen can't turn back into a worker. She'd starve. She must keep growing and then she must leave.

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.

Six saw a caterpillar.' 'What kind?' 'Green, with purple and white zigzags.' 'I see,' Thaniel said slowly. Liking children did not keep him from being perplexed by them. He was recently too old to remember his own childhood with any clarity. 'I imagine that was exciting?' She glanced up at him warily. 'No. It was just a caterpillar.

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

The safest way to success is to write according to the capacity of the stupidest member of the audience.

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

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.

When they returned to Filigree Street, Mori refused even to go upstairs. Instead he hid under a quilt in the parlour with Thaniel's never-read copy of Anna Karenina. The Russians, he said, knew how to write genuinely boring novels, and he would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough. They were all the more boring because he could remember reading the end in the recent future.