Natasha Pulley Quotes & Sayings

. . .She started to feel a bubble of lightness coming up through her ribs. It had been very fragile at first, but she thought now it was made of something stronger than suds. . .
(p. 121) — Natasha Pulley

No,"Ito said gently, "we will not be needing soldiers. Accountants will do nicely."
Mutsuhito frowned. "How does one storm a castle with accountants ?"
"One buys it, sir. — Natasha Pulley

There was a cheer, and he took his first deep breath for months. He hadn't been aware of breathing shallowly. It had happened gradually; someone had put a penny on his chest every hour since November, and now the weight of thousands of pennies had lifted at once — Natasha Pulley

Six saw a caterpillar.'

'What kind?'

'Green, with purple and white zigzags.'

'I see,' Thaniel said slowly. Liking children did not keep him from being perplexed by them. He was recently too old to remember his own childhood with any clarity. 'I imagine that was exciting?'

She glanced up at him warily. 'No. It was just a caterpillar. — Natasha Pulley

but she studied classics, the most pointless subject in the university. — Natasha Pulley

As to why you've got it, silly things help with nerves. — Natasha Pulley

Mori made an unwilling sound. 'I don't like Western art.'

'No look at this.' He lifted it from its package. It wasn't heavy. 'It's clever, it looks like busy Mozart.'

'What?'

'I . . .' Thaniel sighed. 'I see sound. Mozart looks like this. You know. Fast strings.'

'See? In front of you?'

'Yes. I'm not mad.'

'I didn't think so. All sounds?'

'Yes. — Natasha Pulley

He was from Glasgow. Everything past "good morning" was a blur. — Natasha Pulley

Being solitary isn't a disease that needs a cure. — Natasha Pulley

Think of horse races. People like to bet on the one with three legs and a wheeze.They don't bet on that one because they think it will win, but because they can see how very glorious it would be if it were to win — Natasha Pulley

People shouldn't be throwing away their history when it's still doing archery practice forty miles up the road. — Natasha Pulley

Loyalty is a continuous phenomenon, you don't score points for past action, — Natasha Pulley

Nobody wants a house in Osaka,' he said, and it was strange to hear him switch suddenly to foreign pronunciation in the middle of his English. 'It would mean you had to live in Osaka.'

'What's wrong with it?'

'It's like . . . Birmingham. — Natasha Pulley

It is not summer, England doesn't have summer, it has continuous autumn with a fortnight's variation here and there. — Natasha Pulley

Tallis with no pedal, Handel with, even the horrible organ piece that had been written for someone with three hands. He had thought it had all gone, but all he had done was lock himself up in a few little rooms and assume the rest of the house had fallen down. It hadn't. There were doors and doors, and dust, but when the curtains opened and the drapes came off, it was all where he had left it and hardly faded. He took his hands from the keys and sat with them in his lap instead, because his thoughts were echoing in the new space. — Natasha Pulley

Under the gas lamps, mist pawed at the windows of the closed shops, which became steadily shabbier nearer home. It was such a smooth ruination that he could have been walking forward through time, watching the same buildings age five years with every step, all still as a museum — Natasha Pulley

The Ancient Greeks? If they had steam engines, why didn't they have trains?'
. . .
'They were philosophers; they put two and two together and got a goldfish.'
(p. 76) — Natasha Pulley

Englishmen were rained on too often to come up with anything that imaginative. — Natasha Pulley

My cousin should be careful of tying his shoelace is a melon field......anyone might think he was stealing — Natasha Pulley

. . . More octo . . .pi?' Thaniel said, knowing that it sounded wrong, though so did puses and podes. He tried to think where he had heard it last , but he did not often have business with more than one octopus at a time. — Natasha Pulley

When a sign says don't walk on the grass, one hops.' He — Natasha Pulley

I'll give you a cake if you get him in the stream by the end of the afternoon,' Mori said to Six.

'Hold on,' Thaniel said. 'No making criminals of the orphans, Fagin.'

'But I want some cake,' Six frowned. 'And his name isn't Fagin. — Natasha Pulley

Your science can save a man's life, but imagination makes it worth living. — Natasha Pulley

Mori looked across and was, briefly, a languageless, inhuman thing rescued from the sea and asked for an impious favour. — Natasha Pulley

What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.

'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment. — Natasha Pulley

Mori smiled properly. The lines around his eyes were deeper than usual now. They made him look like an old photograph of a young man, often crushed, but ironed carefully so that only the ghosts of the marks remained. — Natasha Pulley

Thaniel listened for a while longer, because the silence was so deep and clear that he could hear ghosts of the thirty-six of thirty-seven possible worlds in which Grace had not won at the roulette, and not stepped backward into him. He wished then that he could go back and that the ball had landed on another number. He would be none the wiser and he would be staying at Filigree Street, probably for years, still happy, and he wouldn't have stolen those years from a lonely man who was too decent to mention that they were missing. — Natasha Pulley

Science had to have some mystery otherwise everyone would find out how simple it was. — Natasha Pulley

science can save a man's life, but imagination makes it worth living. Take — Natasha Pulley

Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said 'do not walk on the grass', one hopped. Anybody who didn't had failed to understand what Oxford was. — Natasha Pulley

The water in the drains below the cobbles muttered. — Natasha Pulley

The safest way to success is to write according to the capacity of the stupidest member of the audience. — Natasha Pulley

The creeping sense that he might have seen him reading the book came up from the ground, but that was more anxiety than evidence. — Natasha Pulley

In Japan, first names are only for who you're married to, or if you're being rude,' the watchmaker explained. — Natasha Pulley

It was embarrassing to be associated with a man who thought Newton was a town. — Natasha Pulley

The cab took them past other libraries and townhouses, then the redbrick walls of Keble College with their zigzag patterns, which looked ridiculous and spoke, Grace suspected, of the general unavailability of proper Cotswolds sandstone. — Natasha Pulley

William had played [rugby] at Eton when it first became popular, and now he only spoke of it in a reverent tone he normally saved only for women and rifles. . . . .
[in contrast] Cricket had rules: one was not allowed to stamp on the head of another player and pass it off as enthusiasm. — Natasha Pulley

Is it white wine? Red tastes like vinegar.'

'Of course it's white wine, I'm Japanese. — Natasha Pulley

I'm a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don't. — Natasha Pulley

When they returned to Filigree Street, Mori refused even to go upstairs. Instead he hid under a quilt in the parlour with Thaniel's never-read copy of Anna Karenina. The Russians, he said, knew how to write genuinely boring novels, and he would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough. They were all the more boring because he could remember reading the end in the recent future. — Natasha Pulley