Top 87 M T Anderson Quotes
#1. where we could see the stars. "Whoa," I said. "Isn't it beautiful?" "It's like . . . ," I said. "It's like a squid in love with the sky.
M T Anderson
#2. Tomorrow is the benefit dinner for the Save the Chameleon Fund. The Decentville Zoo thinks their chameleons are either dead, missing, or plaid.
M T Anderson
#3. How do we change - within moments, the whole form of our habits and dispositions may become alien to us, and we almost cannot remember what we were.
M T Anderson
#4. It felt good, really good, just to scream finally. I felt like I was singing a hit single. But in Hell.
M T Anderson
#5. ... It's like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on.
M T Anderson
#6. The worst stage was when one could tell she was still awake and almost alert, but she knew that nothing worked. Imprisoned. She was imprisoned. In a statue like the Sphinx. Looking out from the eyes. Her own mind, at that point, was as small and bewildered as a little fly. Behind great battlements.
M T Anderson
#7. Often that which most we fear births the resolve that spurs us on to altitudes we could not have achieved, had we continued walking on our customary paths.
M T Anderson
#8. We ain't anything more than a name and some likes and some distastes, and a story we tell about ourselves.'
And what others say about us.
M T Anderson
#9. I'm electric with vertigo, even though I'm on the ground, vertigo like I felt once when I stood on the edge of a high cliff in Arizona and looked straight down.
M T Anderson
#10. We watched each other's eyes. We were as strangers, in that moment - as intimate as strangers - for strangers know more of us, and can judge of us more without reproach than ever those we love.
M T Anderson
#11. Of course, I had my heart broken as a teen. I was desperately in love with myself. Then I found out that I was completely shallow. I haven't spoken to myself since.
M T Anderson
#12. My boy - we are a tiny race . . . involved in a vast pursuit . . . amidst the cold stars . . . and all bound together by reason and amity.
M T Anderson
#13. At long last, you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you.
M T Anderson
#14. You made her apologize for sickness. For her courage. You made her feel sorry for dying.
M T Anderson
#15. ...I meditated on the passage of time, and how it may be found in both a dry and a wet or gaseous state; how, though lush, it might be dessicated for storage.
M T Anderson
#16. People ask me whether I feel any hope for the future. I want to say to you: Yes, I do. I absolutely do.
Not hope for the human race; we're screwed. But I feel tremendous hope for the Insect Overlords who shall succeed us as masters of the Earth.
M T Anderson
#17. My idea of life, it's what happens when they're rolling the credits.
M T Anderson
#18. I looked at her, and she was smiling like she was broken.
M T Anderson
#19. Cars were stopped in the middle of roads so people could run into discount clothing stores.
M T Anderson
#20. And then, this she offered to me, my one truth: "Our language," she said, "is not spoken, but sung ... Not simply words ... and grammar ... but melody. It was hard ... thus ... to learn English ... this language of wood. For the people of your nation, Octavian, all speech is song.
M T Anderson
#21. I can read. A little. I kind of protested it in School(TM). On the grounds that the silent 'E' is stupid.
M T Anderson
#22. The tumults of time are oft passed by in records of the private memoirist; for our days consist not of the Senatorial speech and the refracted solar beam cast through heroic cloud, but rather of bread eaten, and ink blotted, and talk of the sermon, and walks along the whiskery avenues in the garden.
M T Anderson
#23. Who do we seek, my spies? Again and again, I announce to the world: I. M. Realdom! I. M. Realdom! I. M. Realdom! I cannot say it too often! Do you have that?
M T Anderson
#24. was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me, and I could never exactly catch up to it.
M T Anderson
#26. In my fancy, you perch in the Cooperage & I smell the Peel of the Wood, & the Staves are around you & the white Hogsheads newly bound & the Shavings curled and looped upon the Floor, silver and gold--& you are eating a fat Mushroom.
M T Anderson
#27. I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.
M T Anderson
#28. It meant different things to different people, but somehow it meant them all intensely. Shostakovich's words just confuse the issue. His symphony itself is what remains. Listen to it. It is your symphony to write with him.
M T Anderson
#29. The British Army and Navy sang a rousing song called "Heart of Oak"; the rebels had writ one to counter it called "The Liberty Song." Both songs blustered of freedom; but both were sung to the same tune.
And we, to avoid offense, played the tune without words.
M T Anderson
#31. I have this weird, bad feeling," said another boy. "In my feeling parts. Like something bad is going to happen.
M T Anderson
#32. The hafts of the tools were stained black with th sweat of us all, our contributions, black and white alike.
M T Anderson
#33. I hope thou shalt never retreat beneath the ground. The sun is thy inheritance. The sky is thy birthright. Stay here, my boy, and with the conversation of mankind. rejoice in the light.
M T Anderson
#34. It makes good times even better when you know they are going to end. Like grilled vegetables are better because some of them are partly soot.
M T Anderson
#35. Some love is so powerful after all, that it must always include sadness, because encrypted within it is the knowledge that someday it will come to an end.
M T Anderson
#36. Almost nothing lives here anymore, except where we plant it? No. No, no, no. We don't know any of that. We have tea parties with our teddies. We go sledding. We enjoy being young. We take what's coming to us. That's our way.
M T Anderson
#37. Image of a girl holding a blaster to a twin's temple. "Remember, bi***. You can't spell 'danger' without DNA."
Blam.
M T Anderson
#38. Her slippers went fitik, fitik, sliss, fitik, on the floors. They were soft sounds, like the sounds mouths make when they open and close.
M T Anderson
#39. In all things we become acclimated; this is our strength in wartime, and also our weakness. What is a principle, if it alter with circumstance?
But what is a man, if he cannot change to meet changed times?
And if he can change to meet changed times, is he a man, or several in succession?
M T Anderson
#40. Hold on to your hats, ladies!' cried Jasper Dash. 'You're in for a wild ride! This futuristic buggy can attain speeds of up to thirty-five miles per hour!
M T Anderson
#41. when I think of really living, living to the full - all my ideas are just the opening credits of sitcoms.
M T Anderson
#42. Then it was this big thing. She was like, 'I never want to see you again', and I was like, 'Fine. Okay? Fine. Then get some special goggles.
M T Anderson
#43. You need the noise of your friends in space.
M T Anderson
#44. On the artillery shells produced in Leningrad, workers stenciled messages to the Germans: "For the blood of our workers," "For our children's anguish," and "For our murdered friends.
M T Anderson
#45. There is no virtue in concealment. When the earth is rendered chaos, regulations of speech and propriety are rendered impotent, just as city may become desolate, and street, battle ground, and flesh may become fire.
M T Anderson
#46. All the beasts from sloth to pigmy shrew, arrayed silently in ordered cavalcade as if waiting admission to the Ark.
M T Anderson
#47. Strangely enough, doctors and nurses noted that activity actually prolonged life, when it should have shortened it. Those who lay down and tried to conserve energy often were the ones who trailed off and died first.
M T Anderson
#48. We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.
M T Anderson
#49. Altruism is the kind of pie best eaten with a lot of gravy and little inspection of the kind of kidney it's stuffed with.
M T Anderson
#50. There is no refreshment more gratifying to the soul than the sight of Nature in her summer finery, before the heat is at its most intense. She is soothing, but not soporific; intoxicating without inebriation.
M T Anderson
#52. Empedolces claims that in utero, our backbone is one long solid; and that through the constriction of the womb and the punishments of birth it must be snapped again and again to form our vertebrae; that for the child to have a spine, his back must first be broken
M T Anderson
#53. Katie cleared her throat again. Then she looked into the window at her gums. She said, To change the subject, do you think I could tell if I had gingivitis?
M T Anderson
#54. I always thought you were someone things happened to."
"What sorts of things?"
"You know. I thought you led a life of risk and adventure."
She shrugged. "Here's what I know: People will think that, if you have a certain kind of hair.
M T Anderson
#55. The sky was as blue as a stupid postcard, and the islands were as green as islands.
M T Anderson
#56. and we smoke their sorrow contentedly; and we eat their sorrow; and we wear their sorrow; and wonder how it came so cheap. It
M T Anderson
#57. There's an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we're all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there's nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.
M T Anderson
#58. One of the best things about road-tripping with monks is that monks are used to repeating chants over and over and over, so they really don't mind songs like 'Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall' or 'The Song That Never Ends.
M T Anderson
#59. We could sing to lift our spirits,' one of them suggested.
Believe me, you want me to end the chapter now.
M T Anderson
#60. There are times when friendship feels like running down a hill together as fast as you can, jumping over things, spinning around, and you don't care where you're going, and you don't care where you've come from, because all that matters is speed, and the hands holding your hands.
M T Anderson
#61. Music hath its land of origin; and yet it is also its own country, its own sovereign power, and all may take refuge there, and all, once settled, may claim it as their own, and all may meet there in amity; and these instruments, as surely as instruments of torture, belong to all of us.
M T Anderson
#62. I could see my face, crying, in her blank eye.
M T Anderson
#63. I believe,' said Marcus Furius, 'that an order of male virgins who never see the light of day would be ideal for the operation of a computing machine such as this.
M T Anderson
#64. The natural world is so adaptable ... So adaptable you wonder what's natural.
M T Anderson
#65. We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.
M T Anderson
#66. If we're going to ask our kids at age 18 to go off to war and die for their country, I don't see any problem with asking them at age 16 to think about what that might mean.
M T Anderson
#67. I shall speak of love...
and of hate.
It is truly a marvel, but I tell you, hatred and love may live cramped together, crouching in the same heart.
M T Anderson
#68. When I am feeling rotten, I like to walk. When you walk, there's a kind of rhythm. Your mind slows down to match your body. Your thoughts start to go in lazy, comfortable circles.
M T Anderson
#69. Perhaps," said Jasper shyly, "you would like some Gargletine Instant Breakfast Drink?"
Katie fixed him with a long, level stare. Gargletine TM caused hysteria in lab rats and took the brown off horses. "Maybe not," said Katie. "But thanks.
M T Anderson
#70. Those accustomed to failure fear the novelty of success. Those taught the lessons of subordination are oft timid in the school of self-service.
M T Anderson
#71. Dear reader. Dear, dear reader. Here we find ourselves, you and me, engaged in a book in which someone has just exclaimed, in all seriousness, 'The sentient lobsters!'
How did we end up here? Did we make some mistake along the way?
M T Anderson
#72. And I realize that the decision to be human is not one single instant, but is a thousand choices made very day. It is choices we make every second and requires constant vigilance. We have to fight to remain human.
M T Anderson
#73. I looked over at her face. I could see the light from my heartbeat on her tears.
M T Anderson
#74. Though day, the crickets called in the grass; my mother's singing rose from the camp. I lifted my arms; I could not help it. The breeze itself was warm; the islands soft with moss; the loons calling melancholy in forgotten bays; and Life in all its operations seemed unspeakably generous.
M T Anderson
#75. Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling around inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.
M T Anderson
#76. It is a land of Wonders!
It is a land of Mystery.
It is a land that Time Forgot (or chose specifically not to remember).
Cut off from the civilized world for untold years, this land is called:
Delaware.
M T Anderson
#77. Other people just have fun. They have fun, and it comes naturally to them.
M T Anderson
#78. Torture is a good way to get people to talk but a poor method of finding out the truth; people confess whether there is any reality to the confession or not.
-Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad
M T Anderson
#79. I hope,' muttered Jasper, 'we do not ever shop again at a place where vampires can buy clip-on bow ties. You would think with all of eternity in front of them, they could take the time to learn a simple knot.
M T Anderson
#80. I run through the woods, at once applauding myself for my wit-"
"Well deserved, sir. Well deserved."
"And at the self instant, I am grinding my teeth because I am a vain, revenging idiot and shall be run down because of it.
M T Anderson
#81. Lily told her about what had happened so far. (If you're interested, you can go back to the beginning of the book and read all the way through to this point again.)
M T Anderson
#82. We all flee in hope of finding some ground of security
M T Anderson
#83. It does not take long to die, nor to kill. A life is present or absent, and it is an instant passed between those extremities.
M T Anderson
#84. It is ever the lot of children to accept their circumstances as universal, and their particularities as general.
M T Anderson
#85. I am not sure what it is that finally allows people to just turn to each other and touch. There is some hidden trigger. There is a secret language people learn, so they can signal to stop talking and just move. I don't know it.
M T Anderson
#86. I went to him & put my Hand upon his Shoulder.
Said he to me, "God forgive me. Her Name - I never knew her Name."
Which meant not a Jot to me - and yet my Heart was the Thing that broke.
M T Anderson
#87. We enter a time of calamity. Blood on the tarmac. Fingers in the juicer. Towers of air frozen in the lunar wastes. Models dead on the runways, with their legs facing backward. Children with smiles that can't be undone. Chicken shall rot in the aisles. See the pillars fall.
M T Anderson
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
