Cloud Atlas Quotes

Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

Whoever opined “Money can’t buy you happiness” obviously had far too much of the stuff.

Imagine a bleeding calf is thrashing in a shark-infested shallows. What to do--stay out of the water or try to stay the jaws of the sharks? Such was our choice.

All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick trash are all invisible.

Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. . . What’s selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.

Now I’m a spent firework; but at least I’ve been a firework.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?

The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.

All boundaries are conventions, national ones too. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.

There ain’t no journey what don’t change you some.

We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.

I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I’ll be waiting for you there.

People pontificate, “Suicide is selfishness.” Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one’s audience with one’s mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize.

Truth is singular. Its ‘versions’ are mistruths.

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely.