Best 19 quotes of Lavie Tidhar on MyQuotes

Destiny is like a book. It needs manufacturing, the pulp process, the glue fixed tightly--and it requires a binding, to hold it together, lest it fall apart.

Family wasn't like that, not really. It was not something small and compact, a "nuclear family": it was a great big mess of people, all interlinked, cousins and aunts and relatives-by-marriage and otherwise--it was a network, like the Conversation or a human brain. It was what he had tried to escape, going into the Up and Out, but you cannot run away from family, it follows you, wherever you go.

For one crazy moment he had the notion of a vanished tribe of librarians, lost in the deep underground caverns of the Bodleian, a wild and savage tribe that fed on unwary travellers.

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?

I think a lot about the might-have-beens, the what-ifs. About the little places in history where one tiny, minute change can lead to a new and unimaginable future. It's like chess, so many permutations, probabilities, choices, cross-roads...I think a lot about the future, our future. And I see uncertainty.

I was covered in gore, dripping in slime, and in a very bad mood.

Listen to this. A bomb goes off downtown and the police arrest the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and Osama Bin Laden. They put them in an identity parade and have a witness try to point out the perpetrator. Who does she pick?" Joe said, "I don’t know." "Osama Bin Laden," the taxi driver said. "Because the other three don’t exist.

Meeting one’s heroes is always such a disappointment.

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

Perhaps it is always summer, in the place where we are young.

Somewhere in the distance he could hear a wireless playing Judy Garland's 'Over the Rainbow.' Wolf had seen the film but, had he been the one swept up to the magical land of Oz, he would have raised an army of flying monkeys, stuck the witches in a concentration camp, razed the Emerald City to the ground and executed the wizard for communist sympathies, being a Jew, a homosexual, intellectually retarded, or all of the above. He did like the tune, though.

The English, he thought, had once conquered most of the known world, but their cooking hadn't improved as a result.

The fat man looked amused. "What on earth for?" he said. "I never have any contact with writers. If I do, they just keep pestering me about getting paid.

These were the facts. Facts were important. They separated fiction from reality, the tawdry world of Mike Longshott from the concrete spaces of Joe's world.

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 the time of myths, Orphan. They are the cables that run under the floors and power the world, the conduits of unseen currents, the steam that powers the great engines of the earth.

This is the time of myths. They are woven into the present like silk strands from the past, like a wire mesh from the future, creating an interlacing pattern, a grand design, a repeating motif. Don't dismiss myth, boy. And never, ever, dismiss the Bookman

We cannot stop this war but we can fight it, in the shadows, the Old Man says. You have a choice. We all have a choice. We can give in to the darkness, or we can fight it, and elect to try and make the world a slightly less terrible place than it is. Perhaps we'll fail. If we succeed in what we do, no one would thank us. If we die, no one will remember us.

You know, Herr Schleier? It shimmered a pale blue, the ice did. And the sky, so black, a darkness undisturbed, so very strange, inhuman. Takes a deep shuddering breath, says, And amongst it, stars. So many stars, Franz says. Gulps down hot chocolate, Adam’s apple bobbing up. So many stars. And each and every one is a sum, hiding multiple planets, worlds. War on each one, perhaps. He laughs.