Cloud Atlas Quotes

Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints. Through rotting kelp, sea cocoa-nuts & bamboo, the tracks led me to their maker, a White man, his trowzers & Pea-jacket rolled up, sporting a kempt beard & an outsized Beaver, shoveling & sifting the cindery sand with a teaspoon so intently that he noticed me only after I had hailed him from ten yards away. Thus it was, I made the acquaintance of Dr. Henry Goose, surgeon to the London nobility.

He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation.

A telegram, Sixsmith? You ass.

Don’t send any more, I beg you—telegrams attract attention!

V.A. was unsure of himself for once. “I dreamt of a … nightmarish café, brilliantly lit, but underground, with no way out. I’d been dead a long, long time. The waitresses all had the same face. The food was soap, the only drink was cups of lather. The music in the café was”—he wagged an exhausted finger at the MS—“this.”

She plays with that birthmark in the hollow of my shoulder, the one you said resembles a comet—can’t abide the woman dabbling with my skin.

Robert Frobisher mentions a comet-shaped birthmark between his shoulder blade and collarbone.

I just don’t believe in this crap. I just don’t believe it. I don’t.

He yanks the wheel sharply, and metal screams as the Beetle is sandwiched between his car and the bridge railing until the railing unzips from its concrete and the Beetle lurches out into space.

I will not deny a nascent sense of a silver lining to this tragic turn. My Haymarket office suite housed ninety-five unsold shrink-wraps of Dermot Hoggins’s Knuckle Sandwich, impassioned memoir of Britain’s soon to be most famous murderer. Frank Sprat—my stalwart printer in Sevenoaks, to whom I owed so much money I had the poor man over a barrel—still had the plates and was ready to roll at a moment’s notice.

Hardcovers, ladies and gentlemen.

Fourteen pounds ninety-nine pence a shot.

A taste of honey!

Ominous, no? I had seen One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest with an extraordinarily talentless but wealthy and widowed poetess whose collected works, Verses Wild & Wayward, I was annotating but who was less widowed than initially claimed, alas. “Look, I’m sure you’re a reasonable woman.” The oxymoron passed without comment. “So read my lips. I am not supposed to be here. I checked into Aurora House believing it to be a hotel.”

Truth is singular. Its “versions” are mistruths.

Catechism Three teaches that for servers to keep anything denies Papa Song’s love for us and cheats His Investment. I wondered, did Yoona~939 still observe any Catechism? But misgivings, though grave, were soon lost in the treasures Yoona showed me there: a box of unpaired earrings, beads, tiaras. The xquisite sensation of dressing in pureblood clothes overcame my fear of being discovered. Greatest of all, however, was a book, a picture book.

Old Georgie’s path an’ mine crossed more times’n I’m comfy mem’ryin’, an’ after I’m died, no sayin’ what that fangy devil won’t try an’ do to me … so gimme some mutton an’ I’ll tell you ’bout our first meetin’. A fat joocesome slice, nay, none o’ your burnt wafery off’rin’s …

So hungrysome was my curio, I held it again, an’ the egg vibed warm till a ghost-girl flickered’n’appeared there! Yay, a ghost-girl, right ’bove the egg, as truesome as I’m sittin’ here, her head’n’neck was jus’ floatin’ there, like ’flection in moon-water, an’ she was talkin’! Now I got scared an’ took my hands off the sil’vry egg, but the ghost-girl stayed, yay.

List’n, savages an’ Civ’lizeds ain’t divvied by tribes or b’liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev’ry human is both, yay. Old Uns’d got the Smart o’ gods but the savagery o’ jackals an’ that’s what tripped the Fall. Some savages what I knowed got a beautsome Civ’lized heart beatin’ in their ribs. Maybe some Kona. Not ’nuff to say-so their hole tribe, but who knows one day? One day.

Zachry my old pa was a wyrd buggah, I won’t naysay it now he’s died. Oh, most o’ Pa’s yarnin’s was jus’ musey duck fartin’ an’ in his loonsome old age he even b’liefed Meronym the Prescient was his presh b’loved Sonmi, yay, he ’sisted it, he said he knowed it all by birthmarks an’ comets’n’all.

The economics of corpocracy. The genomics industry demands huge quantities of liquefied biomatter, for wombtanks, but most of all, for Soap. What cheaper way to supply this protein than by recycling fabricants who have reached the end of their working lives? Additionally, leftover “reclaimed proteins” are used to produce Papa Song food products, eaten by consumers in the corp’s dineries all over Nea So Copros. It is a perfect food cycle.

We see a game beyond the endgame. I refer to my Declarations, Archivist. Media has flooded Nea So Copros with my Catechisms. Every schoolchild in corpocracy knows my twelve “blasphemies” now.

“I wouldn’t have locked up Noakes and stolen a car if I’d known you couldn’t pick the lock!”

“Aye, exactly, you’re nesh, so you needed encouragement.”

That is more or less it. Middle age is flown, but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.

“I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?”

Seaboardgate is no longer her scoop. Swannekke swarms with reporters, Senate investigators, FBI agents, county police, and Hollywood scriptwriters. Swannekke B is in mothballs; C is suspended.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year’s fragments into a “sextet for overlapping soloists”: piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan’t know until it’s finished, and by then it’ll be too late, but it’s the first thing I think of when I wake, and the last thing I think of before I fall asleep.

Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead long. Once my Luger lets me go, my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat. Thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter, my resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet. Such elegant certainties comfort me at this quiet hour.

“The weak are meat the strong do eat.”

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?