Top 86 M.R. Carey Quotes
#2. And the sun comes out, like a kiss on the cheek from God.
M.R. Carey
#3. One to untie me, the other to point the gun at me. That's how many it takes.
M.R. Carey
#4. The horror of the unknown is more frightening than any horror you can understand
M.R. Carey
#5. Overthrow is a nicely judged word. It suggests a wrestler being flung to the mat. That only happens when you move outside your centre of gravity. Your enemy can't throw you if you have your feet firmly planted. Which
M.R. Carey
#6. Jess wasn't religious. Not even a little bit. She thought all gods were basically big bully-boy cops dreamed up by people who wanted the laws they liked on Earth to be true everywhere else.
M.R. Carey
#7. She breathes in shallow sips. The smell of the human remains, and of years of enclosed decay, freights the air so heavily it's almost a physical presence. With
M.R. Carey
#8. It's absolutely necessary to know who you are, as the basis for knowing anything else.
M.R. Carey
#9. But the knowledge isn't any good without the infrastructure.
M.R. Carey
#10. Nothing is quite clear from the drug-fueled night when a blaze set in her apartment killed the little boy upstairs. But when the media brands Jess a child-killer, she starts to believe it herself.
M.R. Carey
#11. She's in the club. The hopelessly-outnumbered-and-surrounded-by-monsters club.
M.R. Carey
#12. What she doesn't like is the cruelties in his past, and in hers, over which she'll have to crawl to get to him.
M.R. Carey
#13. If he says something that isn't true, he is bringing uncertainty into the world. He is blinding the people around him to a small part of the truth - and every part of the truth is important. You can't complete a jigsaw if one of its pieces has been swapped out for a piece of a different jigsaw.
M.R. Carey
#14. This isn't life. It's something that's playing out in its own self-contained subroutine.
M.R. Carey
#15. The point of history, the very essence of it as a field of study, is to find correspondences. You look at the past so that you can understand it, and through it you come to a better understanding of your own time. If you're lucky, sometimes you can even extrapolate to possible futures." "I'm not
M.R. Carey
#16. No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.
M.R. Carey
#17. These things fill Melanie's mind with wild surmise. She says nothing, drinks it all in. "Transfer
M.R. Carey
#18. A big refugee camp governed by real terror and artificially pumped-up optimism - like the bastard child of Butlins and Colditz.
M.R. Carey
#19. She thinks: all journeys are the same journey, whether you're moving or not. And the things that look like endings are all just stations on the way.
M.R. Carey
#20. But the world is winding down, and you take what you're given.
M.R. Carey
#21. She's as big as four-fifths of five-eighths of fuck all, but she takes no bullshit from anyone.
M.R. Carey
#22. It's may we live as long as we want, and never want as long as we live,
M.R. Carey
#23. When she holds that thought up to the light and sees how pathetic it is, how cravenly equivocating, she sinks into black depression. From
M.R. Carey
#24. She sees Selkirk watching her, with a slightly guarded expression. Piqued, she snaps her fingers and points, making Selkirk pick up the bone-saw and hand it back to her. Now
M.R. Carey
#25. Yesterday she thought that the hungries were like houses that people used to live in. Now she thinks that every one of those houses is haunted.
M.R. Carey
#26. Not everyone who looks human is human," he says. "No," Miss Justineau agrees. "I'm with you on that one." Kenny's
M.R. Carey
#27. Holy fuck,' Corcoran said, leaning back against the wall. 'I am going home and drinking a whole bottle of Bacardi. Someone can pour the Coke into me after I pass out.
M.R. Carey
#28. When the sun comes up, Justineau is silently amazed. It seemed entirely plausible that this ontological impasse would go on for ever. Through
M.R. Carey
#29. Caldwell speaks in the dry, inflectionless tone of a lecturer, but her expression hardens as she stares down at the thing that is both her nemesis and the focal point of her waking life. "If
M.R. Carey
#30. She faces him, trying to take a breath that's long and level, trying to pull all the slopping emotions back inside so he won't see them in her face.
M.R. Carey
#31. Loyalty is just the wheels on the bus ... meaning that it keeps things moving but it's neutral when it comes to the direction they move in.
M.R. Carey
#32. Because the bag is full of colours - starbursts and wheels and whorls of dazzling brightness that are as fine and complex in their structures as the branch is, only much more symmetrical. Flowers.
M.R. Carey
#33. Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You've already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.
M.R. Carey
#34. This gauntlet, flung down by a bullying, contemptuous universe that allowed human beings to grope their way to sentience just so it could put them in their place that bit more painfully.
M.R. Carey
#35. The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you're only showing that you're unworthy of it.
M.R. Carey
#36. Evidence is evidence, Your Honour. Like water, it finds its level.
M.R. Carey
#37. They're just kids. And their childhood has probably been as big a load of shit as his was. In a perfect world, he would have been one of them.
M.R. Carey
#38. And one of the reasons why he likes her is because she's so different from him. She's as big as four-fifths of five-eighths of fuck all, but she takes no bullshit from anyone. She even talks back to the Sarge, which is like watching a mouse bark at a pitbull.
M.R. Carey
#39. Nothing goes on forever. If it did, there wouldn't be anything else, would there?
M.R. Carey
#40. his arms. "Okay, not that wrong. A couple of
M.R. Carey
#41. It's not just Pandora who had that inescapable flaw. It seems like everyone has been built in a way that sometimes makes them do wrong and stupid things.
M.R. Carey
#42. It's a little bit like a cow listening to a recipe for beef stew.
M.R. Carey
#43. Melanie finds this interesting in spite of herself - that you can use words to hide things, or not to touch them, or to pretend that they're something different than they are.
M.R. Carey
#44. It's like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they'd be born out of the cocoon as something else.
M.R. Carey
#45. They think he doesn't understand. That he can't see. They can't see him.
M.R. Carey
#46. Hit it with anything. Bullets, bricks, your bare hands, harsh language.
M.R. Carey
#47. It was before there were any words; there were just things without names, and things without names don't stay in your mind. They fall out, and then they're gone.
M.R. Carey
#48. Every adult grew from a kid who beat the odds. But at different times, in different places, the odds have been appallingly steep.
M.R. Carey
#49. She's lived in Plato's cave, staring at the shadows on the wall. Now she's been turned around to face the fire.
M.R. Carey
#50. Like blood. Like something about her is wounded, and not healing, and hurting her all the time.
M.R. Carey
#51. Gallagher opens his mouth, shuts it, tries again. "Could make some Molotovs?" he suggests. He nods toward the kitchen. "There's bottles of cooking oil in there." "I don't believe breaking bottles would make a particularly loud noise," Dr Caldwell says acerbically. "It
M.R. Carey
#52. And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what's inside is good or bad. Because it's both. Everything is always both. But you have to open it to find that out.
M.R. Carey
#53. Qui tacet consentire. If you don't say no, you just said yes. He
M.R. Carey
#54. Parks joins her and they continue to boggle in unison. "Any idea?" the sergeant asks at last. Justineau shakes her head. "You?" "I prefer to look at all the evidence first. Then I get someone smarter than I am to explain it to me." They
M.R. Carey
#55. This room is the strangest thing Melanie has ever seen. Of course, she's starting to realise that she hasn't seen all that much, but there are more things here of more baffling variety than she would have thought the whole world could hold.
M.R. Carey
#56. You can't save people from the world. There's nowhere else to take them.
M.R. Carey
#57. You're offering to help us against those things down there, when it seems to me that you'd want to be down there with them, looking up at us, waiting for the dinner bell to ring.
M.R. Carey
#58. Caldwell doesn't answer. She's unfolded her arms for the first time and she's taking a furtive, fearful look at her injuries, like a poker player lifting the corners of his cards to see what Lady Luck has sent along. But
M.R. Carey
#59. They walk on endlessly. Time elongates, fractures, rewinds and replays in stuttering moments that - while they have no coherent internal logic - all seem drearily familiar and inevitable.
M.R. Carey
#60. Facilitator of mass murder, smiling a Judas smile as she ticks the boxes.
M.R. Carey
#61. Past the door, there was a long flight of concrete steps going up and up. She wasn't supposed to see any of that stuff, and Sergeant said, "Little bitch has got way too many eyes on her" as he shoved her chair into her cell and slammed the door shut. But she saw, and she remembers.
M.R. Carey
#62. Out of my way, Private," Justineau says quietly. "Or your brains go public." Parks
M.R. Carey
#63. Parks is on his knees now, a few feet to Justineau's left. He's working the crank to open the door. But it's not opening, even though he's encouraging it with a continuous stream of bad language. Caldwell must have disabled the emergency access. Melanie
M.R. Carey
#64. In an age of rust, she comes up stainless steel
M.R. Carey
#65. One of the things he likes about Justineau is her seriousness. He frigging flatout hates frivolous, thoughtless people who dance across the surface of the world without looking down.
M.R. Carey
#66. His broad, flat face, made asymmetrical and inconceivably ugly by the scar, radiates friendly solicitude. Justineau
M.R. Carey
#67. In most stories she knows, children have a mother and a father, like Iphigenia had Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, and Helen had Leda and Zeus. Sometimes they have teachers too, but not always, and they never seem to have sergeants.
M.R. Carey
#68. The wave hits. It doesn't even slow. Hungries slam full-tilt into the mesh and into the concrete stanchions that support it. It leans inwards, groans and creaks, but seems to be holding. The front ranks of walking corpses are treading water. But
M.R. Carey
#69. fine, dark grey strands. Like plague-flavoured candy floss, Justineau thinks.
M.R. Carey
#70. Hungries toggle between two states. They're frozen in place most of the time, just standing there like they're never going to move again. Then they smell prey, or hear it, or catch sight of it, and they break into that terrifying dead sprint. No warm-up, no warning. Warp factor nine.
M.R. Carey
#71. But the future is uncertain, and he can't get up enough enthusiasm even to masurbate.
M.R. Carey
#72. It's equinox, with the world balanced between winter and summer, life and death, like a spinning ball balanced on the tip of someone's finger.
M.R. Carey
#73. briefly to have stabilised, and a hundred initiatives
M.R. Carey
#74. But a thing can be easily breakable and still be a bastard to deal with. Ice is brittle, but try walking on half an inch of it.
M.R. Carey
#75. He'd stopped cutting when he went to university because he'd become afraid that he would never be able to form a relationship with another human being that was as meaningful as the one he had with his own skin and the blood that flowed underneath it.
M.R. Carey
#76. Out of my way, Private, or your brains go public.
M.R. Carey
#77. Sanity is a suspended state, moored in nothing but itself. You test the ground an inch in front of you, move forward as though it's solid. But the whole world is in freefall and you're in freefall with it.
M.R. Carey
#78. Dr Caldwell stares at her dispassionately. "Now go and get a security detail," she says to Dr Selkirk. "I want this woman under military arrest. The charge will be attempted sabotage." Melanie
M.R. Carey
#79. She's always been a good girl. But she ate pieces of two men, and very probably killed them both. Killed them with her teeth. She was hungry, and they were her bread.
M.R. Carey
#81. Pritchard tutted. "Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It's an emergent property of a very complicated system.
M.R. Carey
#82. There's no point in denying the truth when the truth is self-evident.
M.R. Carey
#83. The words come out of Helen Justineau in a flat monotone. Parks thinks of Gallagher's written report, with its proceeding tos and its thereupons. But Justineau's bowed head and the tightness of her grip on the parapet wall add their own commentary. "I
M.R. Carey
#84. It rains on the just and the unjust. Nothing you can do but turn your collar up.
M.R. Carey
#85. The hungry kid smiles, as though the cascade of waste paper is a firework display. She squints into the sun to follow them as they fly.
M.R. Carey
#86. admires her honesty, which turns white lies into red roadkill.
M.R. Carey
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
