M.R. Carey Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

In an age of rust, she comes up stainless steel — M.R. Carey

She blinks furiously, trying to dredge up some more moisture from her now dry-baked tear ducts. Two of the shapes resolve. One is Selkirk, on her side on the floor of the lab, her legs jackknifing in furious staccato. The other is a hungry which is kneeling astride her, stuffing her spilled intestines into its mouth in pink, sagging coils. More hungries surge in from all sides, hiding Selkirk from view. She's a honey-pot for putrescent bees. The last Justineau sees of her is her inconsolable face. Melanie! — M.R. Carey

She's figured out the brakes by this time, and she slows, intimidated by the echoing bellow of Rosie's engines in these desolate landscapes. She feels for a sickening moment that she might be the last human being left alive on the face of a necrotic planet. And that it might not matter after all. To have the race that built these mausoleums lie in them finally, quiet and resigned, and crumble into dust. Who'd — M.R. Carey

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

It's a little bit like a cow listening to a recipe for beef stew. — M.R. Carey

Will we go home to Beacon? Melanie had asked. When we're grown up? And Miss Justineau looked so sad, so stricken, that Melanie had immediately started to blurt out apologies and assurances, trying to stave off the effects of whatever terrible thing she'd inadvertently said. Which she understands now. From this angle, it's obvious. What she'd said, about going home to Beacon, was impossible, like hot snow or dark sunshine. Beacon was never home to her, and never could be. That — M.R. Carey

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

Out of my way, Private," Justineau says quietly. "Or your brains go public." Parks — M.R. Carey

He hands her his pack, which he's emptied. "You mean me?" Justineau demands. "You think I'm not pulling my weight?" It would feel good to have a stand-up argument with Parks right then, but he doesn't seem keen to play. "No, I didn't mean you. I meant in general." "People in general? You were being philosophical?" "I was being a grumpy bastard. It's what I wear to the office most days. I guess you probably noticed that." She hesitates, wrong-footed. She didn't think Parks was capable of self-deprecation. But then she didn't think he was capable of changing his mind. "Any more rules of engagement?" she asks him, still hurting in some obscure way, still not mollified. "How to survive when shopping? Top tips for modern urban living?" Parks gives the question more consideration than she was expecting. "Use up the last of that e-blocker," he suggests. "And don't die. — M.R. Carey

His broad, flat face, made asymmetrical and inconceivably ugly by the scar, radiates friendly solicitude. Justineau — M.R. Carey

Sergeant wheels the chair back to the door. Melanie takes this in, and reads it right. She won't be needing the chair again. She won't be going back to her cell. Tales the Muses Told is lying under her mattress back there, and she crashes head first into the realisation that she may never see it again. Those pages that smell of Miss Justineau are now, and perhaps for ever, inaccessibly distant. She — M.R. Carey

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

Attenborough's perfectly pitched voice, honey from an English country garden, described with incongruous gentleness how Ophiocordyceps spores lie dormant on the forest floor in humid environments such as the South American rainforest. Foraging ants pick them up, without noticing, because the spores are sticky. They adhere to the underside of the ant's thorax or abdomen. Once attached, they sprout mycelial threads which penetrate the ant's body and attack its nervous system. The — M.R. Carey

briefly to have stabilised, and a hundred initiatives — M.R. Carey

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

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

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

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

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

Pritchard tutted. "Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It's an emergent property of a very complicated system. — M.R. Carey

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

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

The fact that he doesn't smoke and fears alcohol almost as badly as he fears hungries and junkers does nothing to tarnish this dazzling vision. He'd be the man, nonetheless. One of those guys who gets a nod or a word from everybody when he walks into the mess hall, and takes it as his due. A man whose acknowledgement, when granted, confers status on those who get a nod or a word in return. The — M.R. Carey

Tolkien disapproved of Lewis's Narnia books because they worked by analogy, taking an existing myth and retelling it with different names and circumstances, whereas he felt that you should make your own myth out of whole cloth. But it's not possible to read The Silmarillion without seeing how Sauron's fall mirrors Satan's. It's only a question of how you triangulate your relationship to your source material. — M.R. Carey

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

admires her honesty, which turns white lies into red roadkill. — M.R. Carey

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

They think he doesn't understand. That he can't see. They can't see him. — M.R. Carey

You can't save people from the world. There's nowhere else to take them. — M.R. Carey

Helen Justineau is thinking about dead children. She can't narrow it down, or doesn't want to. She thinks about all the children in the world who ever died without growing up. There must have been billions of them. Hecatombs of children, apocalypses, genocides of them. In every war, every famine, thrown to the wall. Too small to protect themselves, too innocent to get out of the way. Killed by madmen, perverts, judges, soldiers, random passers-by, friends and neighbours, their own parents. By stupid chance or ruthless edict. Every — M.R. Carey

It was an accident," he tells her, pointing out the obvious. "And probably you would have ended up doing the right thing. You don't strike me as the sort of person who just lets shit slide." He means that, as far as it goes. One of the things he likes about Justineau is her seriousness. He frigging flat-out hates frivolous, thoughtless people who dance across the surface of the world without looking down. "Yeah, — M.R. Carey

One to untie me, the other to point the gun at me. That's how many it takes. — M.R. Carey

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

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

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

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

And the sun comes out, like a kiss on the cheek from God. — M.R. Carey

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

So Gallagher grew up in a weird microcosm of the wider world outside Beacon. His father, and his brother Steve, and his cousin Jackie looked like normal human beings and even sometimes acted like them, but most of the time they veered between two extremes: reckless violence when they were drinking, and comatose somnolence when the drink wore off. Ricocheting — M.R. Carey

These things fill Melanie's mind with wild surmise. She says nothing, drinks it all in. "Transfer — M.R. Carey

In fact, it's almost big enough to cross time zones. The lab is amidships and takes up nearly half the available space. In front of it and behind it there are weapons stations where two gunners can stand back to back and look out to either side of the vehicle through slit windows like the embrasures in a medieval castle. Each of these stations can be sealed off from the lab by a bulkhead door. Further aft, there's something like an engine room. Forward, there are crew quarters, with a dozen wall-mounted cot beds and two chemical toilets, the kitchen space, and then the cockpit, which has a pedestal gun of the same calibre as the Humvee's and about as many controls as a passenger jet. Justineau — M.R. Carey

Justineau doesn't have any answer. She watches with an eerie sense of dislocation as Caldwell crosses to another part of the lab, comes back with a glass fish tank in which she's set up one of her tissue cultures. It's an older one, with several years of growth. The tank is about eighteen inches by twelve by ten inches high, and its interior is completely filled with a dense mass of fine, dark grey strands. Like plague-flavoured candy floss, Justineau thinks. It's impossible even to tell what the original substrate was; it's just lost in the toxic froth that has sprouted from it. "This — M.R. Carey

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

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

She waited for so long that something strange happened. She started to be able to see. There wasn't any more light to see by. It was just that her eyes decided to give her more information. She'd been told in a lesson once about something called accommodation. The rods and cones of the eye, especially the rods, change their zone of sensitivity so that they can see details and distinctions in what previously looked like total darkness. But there are functional limits to that process, and the resulting picture is mostly black and white because rods aren't good at gradations of colour. This was different. It was like an invisible sun came up in the room, and Melanie could see by its light as well as she could see by day. Or like the space below her went from black ocean to dry land over the space of a few minutes. She wondered if this was something only hungries could do. She — M.R. Carey

Out of my way, Private, or your brains go public. — M.R. Carey

A big refugee camp governed by real terror and artificially pumped-up optimism - like the bastard child of Butlins and Colditz. — M.R. Carey

Nothing goes on forever. If it did, there wouldn't be anything else, would there? — M.R. Carey

It doesn't matter," she explains to Miss J. "I want to be where you are. And I don't know the way back to wherever I was before, anyway. I don't even remember it. All I remember is the block, and you. You're ... " Now it's Melanie's turn to hesitate. She doesn't know the words for this. "You're my bread," she says at last. "When I'm hungry. I don't mean that I want to eat you, Miss Justineau! I really don't! I'd rather die than do that. I just mean ... you fill me up the way the bread does to the man in the song. You make me feel like I don't need anything else. — M.R. Carey

She's as big as four-fifths of five-eighths of fuck all, but she takes no bullshit from anyone. — M.R. Carey

The hungry she caught is still moving sluggishly, despite the horrific damage the door mechanism has done to the muscles and tendons of its upper body. Seen from this close, the size of the head in relation to the body suggests that it may have been even younger at the time of initial infection than Caldwell had previously estimated. But — M.R. Carey

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

There's no point in denying the truth when the truth is self-evident. — M.R. Carey

It's absolutely necessary to know who you are, as the basis for knowing anything else. — M.R. Carey

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

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

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

It rains on the just and the unjust. Nothing you can do but turn your collar up. — M.R. Carey

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

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

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

They're at the gates now, and there's no lock on them that Parks can see, but they don't open. Used to be electric, obviously, but bygones are bygones and in the brave new post-mortem world that just means they don't bloody work. "Over!" he yells. "Up and over!" Which is easily said. A head-high rampart of ornamental ironwork with functional spear points on top says different. They try, all the same. Parks leaves them to it, turns his back to them and goes on firing. The up side is that now he can be indiscriminate. Set to full auto and aim low. Cut the hungries' legs out from under them, turning the front-runners into trip hazards to slow the ones behind. The down side is that more and more of them keep coming. The noise is like a dinner bell. Hungries are crowding into the green space from the streets on every side, at what you'd have to call a dead run. There's no limit to their numbers, and there is a limit to his ammo. Which — M.R. Carey

Caroline Caldwell gets out of Rosie using the cockpit door rather than the midsection door. The midsection door still has the airlock attached and her hungry specimen jammed into it. She walks twenty paces forward. That's as far as she can go, more or less. She stares at the grey wall for a long time. For whole minutes, probably, although she doesn't really trust her time sense any more. Her wounded mouth throbs in time with her heartbeat, but her nervous system is like a flooded carburettor; the engine doesn't catch, the confused signals don't coalesce into pain. Caldwell — M.R. Carey

Hit it with anything. Bullets, bricks, your bare hands, harsh language. — M.R. Carey

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

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

They're still walking south, with the whole of north London and central London and south London to get through. Even for the young private, Caldwell sees, some of the shock and awe has drained away. The only one who's still looking at every new thing they pass with indefatigable wonder is test subject number one. As — M.R. Carey

necrotic planet. — M.R. Carey

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

She speculates for the first time on what Melanie could have been, could have become, if she'd lived before the Breakdown. If she'd never been bitten and infected. Because this is a child here, whatever else she is, and she's never lost that sense of her own centre before except when she smelled blood and turned, briefly into an animal. And look at how pragmatically, how ruthlessly, she's coped with that. But Justineau only pursues this train of thought for a moment. When Melanie starts to speak, she commands their full attention. "I — M.R. Carey

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

everyone down to street level is easy enough, with the ropes. Sergeant Parks decides the order: Gallagher first, so there's someone on the ground who knows how to use a gun, then Helen Justineau, then Dr Caldwell, with himself bringing up the rear. Dr Caldwell is the only one who presents any kind of a problem, since her bandaged hands won't allow her to grip the rope. Parks makes a running knot, which he ties around her waist, and lowers her down. They — M.R. Carey

Like blood. Like something about her is wounded, and not healing, and hurting her all the time. — M.R. Carey

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

Parks scratches his neck. "Really? Even when she told me not to say?" She holds his gaze. "You let her go out there on her own. I already know damn well that you don't see a risk to Melanie as worth taking into account. But I do. And I want to know why you thought it was okay to send her out there." "You're wrong," Parks says. "Am I? About what?" "About me." He plants his butt against the opened cowling of the generator, folds his arms. "Okay, not that wrong. A couple of days ago, I said we should cut the kid loose. She pulled our irons out of the fire twice since then, and on top of that she's turned into a really good scout. I'd be sorry to lose her." Justineau — M.R. Carey

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

But the knowledge isn't any good without the infrastructure. — M.R. Carey

a squatter in the ruins of empire, — M.R. Carey

It's just instinct. Faulty learning. He takes a step back, groping for his sidearm instead of swinging the rifle like a club. Wastes a second that he doesn't have, and it's all over. Except that it isn't. In combat, Parks narrows down. It's not even a conscious thing, so much, or a trick he's learned. It just happens. He does the job that's in front of him, and pretty much shunts everything else into a holding pattern. So — M.R. Carey

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

Justineau puts a hand on Melanie's arm, and Melanie jumps almost a foot into the air. The extreme reaction makes Justineau start back in her turn. "Sorry," she says. "It's all right," Melanie mutters, looking up at her. The girl's blue eyes are wide and fathomless. Normally her emotions are all on the surface, but now, underneath the nerves and the general unhappiness, there are depths that Justineau doesn't know how to interpret. "We — M.R. Carey

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

While the others stare at the fungal glade in sick fascination, Caldwell kneels and picks up one of the fallen sporangia. It looks and feels solid enough, but weighs very little. There's a pleasing smoothness to its integument. Nobody sees as she slips it, very carefully, into the pocket of her lab coat. The next time Sergeant Parks glances around at her, she's fidgeting with her bandages again and looks as though she's been doing it the whole time. They — M.R. Carey

Evidence is evidence, Your Honour. Like water, it finds its level. — M.R. Carey

But the world is winding down, and you take what you're given. — M.R. Carey

The horror of the unknown is more frightening than any horror you can understand — M.R. Carey

his arms. "Okay, not that wrong. A couple of — M.R. Carey

He holds up a book called I Wish I Could Show You. It's got the same kind of pictures in it as The Cat in the Hat, which is why he chose it. He used to love that story about the cat and the fish and the kids and the two Things called 1 and 2. He liked to imagine his own house getting trashed like that, — M.R. Carey

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

Qui tacet consentire. If you don't say no, you just said yes. He — M.R. Carey

I killed that boy, Parks. If you turn my life into an equation, the number that comes out is a minus one. That's my lifetime score, you understand me? And you ... you and Caldwell, and Private Ginger fucking Rogers ... my God, whether it means anything or not, I will die my own self before I let you take me down to minus two. — M.R. Carey

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

fine, dark grey strands. Like plague-flavoured candy floss, Justineau thinks. — M.R. Carey

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

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

But along with these scary thoughts, she also thinks: Sergeant has a name. The same way the teachers do. The same way the children do. Up until now, Sergeant has been more like a god or a Titan to Melanie; now she knows that he's just like everyone else, even if he is scary. He's not just Sergeant, he's Sergeant Parks. The enormity of that change, more than anything else, is what keeps her awake until the doors unlock in the morning and the teachers come. — M.R. Carey

Parks stares at her for a moment, like she's something written in a language he doesn't speak. "Got it all figured out," he acknowledges. "Yes." He leans forward to look her in the eye. "And you're not scared?" Melanie hesitates. "Of what?" she asks him. Justineau is amazed at that momentary pause. Yes or no would be equally easy to say, whether they were true or not. The pause means that Melanie is scrupulous, is weighing her words. It means she's trying to be honest with them. As if they've done a single thing, ever, to deserve that. "Of — M.R. Carey