Lavie Tidhar Quotes & Sayings

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. — Lavie Tidhar

Life isn't a pulp novel, Joe, and death isn't either. — Lavie Tidhar

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

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. — Lavie Tidhar

Let go of Osama Bin Laden, let go of books where bombs go off and people die, let go of this war you have no scale for, that you don't understand. — Lavie Tidhar

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

Stories gave shape to Achimwene's life. Narratives gave a series of random events meaning. And so he shaped this, too, as a story. — Lavie Tidhar

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

Other humans believed the same way they breathed: it came natural to them. The world was filled with synagogues and churches, mosques and temples, shrines to Elron and Ogko. New faiths rose and fell like breath. They bred like flies. They died like species. — Lavie Tidhar

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. — Lavie Tidhar

Books, he thought, were a sort of migratory bird. Here they rested a while, weary of their travels, before taking flight again, before moving, settling in another nest for a time. They seemed to him like a flock that had descended on these tables, pages fluttering like wings, and here they rested in the shade, enjoying the lull, knowing it would soon be time to go on their way again. — Lavie Tidhar

But is it crime or an act of war? Depends on who's telling the story ... — Lavie Tidhar

Or perhaps it was curiosity that motivated them after all, that earliest of motives, the most human and the most suspect, the one that had led Adam to the Tree, in the dawn of Story. — Lavie Tidhar

That big fat oaf Gil Chesterton once said that the criminal is the artist, the detective only the critic ... he was wrong. I was an artist, for it is an artist's purpose to make order out of chaos. A criminal defaces; a detective restores. — Lavie Tidhar

What is a man! What is a man but mended cloth, hastily worn and discarded? ... What makes a man? What makes a hero, Shomer? Is it simply to live when there is nothing left to live for, when all you knew and loved is gone? Is it, simply, to survive? For like the threads of an intricate shawl, we have been pulled at and torn, Shomer. We have been unravelled. — Lavie Tidhar

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. — Lavie Tidhar

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. — Lavie Tidhar

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. — Lavie Tidhar

This place might have been paradise, a treasure trove far greater than any to be found in a pirate yarn.
Everywhere he looked there were books.
They rose into the air in majestic columns, stacks and stacks of them forming a maze that seemed to stretch to forever; the stacks rose high into the air and disappeared towards the unseen ceiling. The air had the overwhelming smell of old books, of polished leather, and yellowing leaves, like the smell of a bookshop or a public library magnified a thousand-fold. — Lavie Tidhar

These fragile, worn, faded, thin, cheap paper-bound books. They smelled of dust, and mould, and age. They smelled, faintly, of pee, and tobacco, and spilled coffee. They smelled like things which had lived.
They smelled like history. — Lavie Tidhar

Life wasn't like that neat classification system, Achimwene had come to realize. Life was half-completed plots abandoned, heroes dying halfway along their quests, loves requited and un-, some fading inexplicably, some burning short and bright. — Lavie Tidhar

It was a war about fear, he thought, not figures on the ground. It was a war of narrative, a story of a war, and it grew in the telling. — Lavie Tidhar

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. — Lavie Tidhar

One dead copper, one dead whore. I was getting too old. Everything hurt. I would miss my books most, I thought. But books, like people, can always be replaced. — Lavie Tidhar

Clocks are the enemies of time ... they are the gaolers of day and the turnkeys of night.
Tom Thumb — Lavie Tidhar

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? — Lavie Tidhar

Space was full of questions, life was a sentence always ending in an ellipsis or a question mark. You couldn't answer everything. You could only believe there were answers at all. — Lavie Tidhar

Do you know what a journalist is? Someone who hasn't written a novel yet. — Lavie Tidhar

London has always been a warren underground, and Pall Mall is no exception: secret passageways, Tube tunnels, sewers, cellars, more of London under- than above-ground. — Lavie Tidhar

It's a small publication dedicated to a scholarly discourse of the Osamaverse. — Lavie Tidhar

He wanted to run through the stacks, pick at the books, sample them one after the other, climb the stacks to their highest reaches and see what treasures were hidden there. — Lavie Tidhar

I still believe, though. In existing. In ex nihilo nihil fit. If nothing comes from nothing, we cannot return to it. Ergo life has a reason and needs to be. — Lavie Tidhar

Joe looked out of the window again. He had the feeling that outside the window there should have been hover-cars, men in trilby hats and jet packs, spider-webs of passageways spreading out of the distant tops of the towers. There should have been women in silver suits taking in a show at the tri-vids before indulging in a spot of lunch, the kind that came in three-course pills, great big subservient robots trailing behind them. Instead there was a brown man in overalls collecting rubbish with a long stick outside an adult cinema, and the cars were halted, bumper-to-bumper, beside a traffic light that seemed to be stuck permanently on red. There was a siren in the distance. There was the sound of car horns, a door slamming, someone cursing loudly in American English. — Lavie Tidhar

A gentleman killed with bullets, the state with gas. Only a madman used a knife. — Lavie Tidhar

Orphan could no longer hear or see the shadows of the dead. He didn't think they had perished. Most likely they were hiding now, somewhere in this landscape of books. — Lavie Tidhar

It is, perhaps, the prerogative of every man or woman to imagine, and thus force a shape, a meaning, onto that wild and meandering narrative of their lives, by choosing genre. A princess is rescued by a prince; a vampire stalks a victim in the dark; a student becomes a master. A circle is completed. An so on. — Lavie Tidhar

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. — Lavie Tidhar

But he knew, too, that there is more than one story in this world at a time; and that her story was not his.
Their stories had entwined, but they had different trajectories, different conclusions. He could only hope the two stories would not separate. It was a strange sort of realisation: that he loved her. — Lavie Tidhar

But it was not real freedom, he realised. It was the freedom that comes from lack of choice and moreover, was the kind that only came with decisions delayed. It was a freedom of inaction. — Lavie Tidhar

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. — Lavie Tidhar

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. — Lavie Tidhar

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 — Lavie Tidhar