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ca2ba0b
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Identity is not negotiable. An identity you have achieved by agreement is always a prison.
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M. John Harrison |
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0561637
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Happiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go on and on ambushing you, presumably until you die.
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memory
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M. John Harrison |
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b1a01d5
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Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East's exuberant vision of the West, the West's uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna -- the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.
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cities
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M. John Harrison |
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37a4c56
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Egnaro is a secret known to everyone but yourself. It is a country or a city to which you have never been; it is an unknown language. At the same time it is like being cuckolded, or plotted against. It is part of the universe of events which will never wholly reveal itself to you: a conspiracy the barest outline of which, once visible, will gall you forever.
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paranoia
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M. John Harrison |
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3634dbf
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Perception of a state is not the state.
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M. John Harrison |
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5de0b9f
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Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From the firs..
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greed
human-nature
thought
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M. John Harrison |
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e89ce94
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Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.
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M. John Harrison |
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fe470d5
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Instead, as the crystal splinters entered Hornwrack's brain, he experienced two curious dreams of the Low City, coming so quickly one after the other that they seemed simultaneous. In the first, long shadows moved across the ceiling frescoes of the Bistro Californium, beneath which Lord Mooncarrot's clique awaited his return to make a fourth at dice. Footsteps sounded on the threshold. The women hooded their eyes and smiled, or else stifled..
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M. John Harrison |
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df9f83c
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After all why should our goal be the reinstatement of an illusory 'exact' relationship between events and words? If you probe in the ashes you will never learn anything about the fire: by the time the ashes can be handled the meaning has passed on. Every adventure is a cup so empty it can be drunk from again and again and again. Every adventure is so perfect it verges on silence.
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M. John Harrison |
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ba37d10
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You can't cure people of their character,' she read. After this he had crossed something out then gone on, 'You can't even change yourself. Experiments in that direction soon deteriorate into bitter, infuriated struggles. You haul yourself over the wall and glimpse new country. Good! You can never again be what you were! But even as you are congratulating yourself you discover tied to one leg the string of Christmas cards, gas bills, air l..
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M. John Harrison |
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c289057
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He was lonely; I wanted to help, of course, but not from so intimate a distance; and lately our meetings had become memorable as a series of comically protracted farewells on station platforms and embarrassed, hasty protestations of friendship made through the windows of departing taxicabs.
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M. John Harrison |
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e9fbed6
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there is endless despair at the centre of every narcissistic self-portrait.
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M. John Harrison |
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f30c4a4
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Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.
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writing
worldbuilding
science-fiction
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M. John Harrison |
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d4c5966
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Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can.
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writing
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M. John Harrison |
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e8b3081
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Everyone loves a mysterious country.
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M. John Harrison |
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fb8272b
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Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontravertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.
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M. John Harrison |
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56f0af8
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Behind all this bad behaviour was an insecurity magnificent in scope, metaphysical in nature. Space was big, and the boys from Earth were awed despite themselves by the things they found there: but worse, their science was a mess. Every race they met on their way through the Core had a star drive based on a different theory. All those theories worked, even when they ruled out one another's basic assumptions. You could travel between the sta..
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M. John Harrison |
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4614d66
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A gull planed steeply over their heads, a precarious flash of white against the windy blue sky. The short, hacking cry of a baby seemed to merge seamlessly for a moment with the gull's repetitive wail, as if they were one species. One species, Falkender thought, raucous and scavenging; one species calling out in pain. To be human is to be mixed and miscegenated like this. To be lost.
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M. John Harrison |
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f6d83e2
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in the morning -- 'When the world looks promising again despite what we know about it' -- ...
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M. John Harrison |
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d4eb58a
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As they moved from exhibit to exhibit like reluctant tourists in some artist's studio, Buffin sat on a stool with his limbs tense. He was like an exhibit himself in the direct odd light filtering through the whitish panes, legs wound tensely round one another, his face like an apologetic bag.
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M. John Harrison |
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5f2fbf0
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Write something about me then,' he said when I came back. He grinned. 'Go on! Now! I bet you can!' 'I don't do portraits, Choe.' The lies liberated from this statement skittered off into infinity like images between two mirrors.
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M. John Harrison |
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4d07bc0
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When I was little, she thought, I wanted nothing except to stop travelling. I wanted time for each new thing, each new feeling, to be held properly in suspension until it could be joined by the next. Given the chance I could easily hold all those beautiful things together. I could be like a box in which they would be held new forever. Instead, everything aged and changed. People too.
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stasis
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M. John Harrison |
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e681170
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It's 2444. We're all someone.
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M. John Harrison |
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467b3b6
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tegeus-Cromis, sometime soldier and sophisticate, who now dwelt quite alone in a tower by the sea and imagined himself a better poet than swordsman.
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M. John Harrison |
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1eeb84f
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She was a tall woman with a wide smile, good tits and a way of licking mayonnaise out the corner of her mouth which suggested she might be equally good at licking mayonnaise out the corner of yours.
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M. John Harrison |
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6fb30f8
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ome seventeen notable empires rose in the Middle Period of Earth. These were the Afternoon Cultures. All but one are unimportant to this narrative, and there is little need to speak of them save to say that none of them lasted for less than a millennium, none for more than ten; that each extracted such secrets and obtained such comforts as its nature (and the nature of the universe) enabled it to find; and that each fell back from the unive..
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M. John Harrison |
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d13ddbc
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Gdy to koty mialy definiowac swiat, wazne miejsce zajmowalyby w nim pozerane dla zabawy muchy
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M. John Harrison |
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d8429d6
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Don't you know, Fat Antoyne, that three old men in white caps throw dice for the fate of the universe?' No, Fat Antoyne said, he had never heard that. 'Their names are Kokey Food, Mr Freedom and The Saint.
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M. John Harrison |
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01f4cae
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Outside, a dog sprawls among the empty tables, its body rocking with the evening heat. Someone has given it a hamburger which first it guards, then, eventually, eats. It's some kind of winter dog, a malamute perhaps, a dog of marvellous subtle greys and whites. Also of transparent intelligence, and less transparent motive. The beauty of an animal like this appears to fix it in our expectations. But while its beauty says one thing, its heart..
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dog
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M. John Harrison |
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c7b972f
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who can but shiver and forgive in the damp theatrical airs of dawn? A
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M. John Harrison |
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3f3e0cf
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Horse-chestnut flowers bobbed like white wax candles above the deserted pavements. An oblique light struck into the street - so that its long and normally "profitless perspective seemed to lead straight into the heart of a younger, more ingenuous city - and fell across the fronts of the houses where he had once lived, warming up the rotten brick and imparting to it a not unpleasant pinkish colour."
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M. John Harrison |
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9651808
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In the water-thickets, the path wound tortuously between umber iron-bogs, albescent quicksands of aluminum and magnesium oxides, and sumps of cuprous blue or permanganate mauve fed by slow, gelid streams and fringed by silver reeds and tall black grasses. The twisted, smooth-barked boles of the trees were yellow-ochre and burnt orange; through their tightly woven foliage filtered a gloomy, tinted light. At their roots grew great clumps of m..
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M. John Harrison |
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5e27643
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The momentum of the charge carried Cromis twenty yards into the press without the need to strike a blow: Northmen fell to the hooves and shoulders of his horse and were trampled. He shouted obscenities at them, and made for the knoll, the smugglers a flying wedge behind him. A pikeman tore a long strip of flesh from the neck of his mount; Cromis hung out of the saddle and swung for the carotid artery; blade bit, and splashed with the piker'..
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M. John Harrison |
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31b620c
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But it wasn't until much later that I learned the sad facts of his death or the sadder ones of his life. By then I could be found in the pavement cafes of Sour Bridge, with a set of my own.
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M. John Harrison |
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d984b52
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Before I came to the city I cut off my hair. It was the first of many fatally symbolic gestures.
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M. John Harrison |
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07af84b
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The right fist rested on the pommel of his plain long sword, which, contrary to the fashion of the time, had no name. Cromis, whose lips were thin and bloodless, was more possessed by the essential qualities of things than by their names; concerned with the reality of Reality, rather than with the names men give it.
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M. John Harrison |
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15f5763
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She has never made up her mind between public acclaim--which she sees, rightly or wrongly, as destructive of the true artistic impulse--and obscurity, for which she is not temperamentally fitted.
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M. John Harrison |
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0f74473
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People try to help, but all they have to work with is their theory of you. In the end they're talking to themselves.
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M. John Harrison |
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e920527
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Some internal process held him rapt. He had begun, perhaps, to map the paths inside himself which led to the Past. This gave him an absentminded air, and an irritable one, as if by our presence we interrupted some private conversation--although had anyone suggested this he would have rejected it angrily. Attempting to live simultaneously in two worlds, he rode moodily ahead and seemed to see nothing--head bowed into rain, blood-red armour p..
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M. John Harrison |
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4562a8f
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He was, and always had been, the repository of more fears than hopes.
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M. John Harrison |
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40173fa
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The true detective [...] starts in the center of the maze. Crimes make their way through to him. Never forget: you uncover your heart at the heart of it.
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M. John Harrison |
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118a0a7
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At Birkin Grif's left, his seat insecure on a scruffy packhorse, Theomeris Glyn, his only armour a steel-stressed leather cap, grumbled at the cold and the earliness of the hour, and cursed the flint hearts of city girls.
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M. John Harrison |
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611bac2
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He ran toward the light. When he passed the corpse of his dead friend, he began to weep again. He picked up his sword. He tried to smash a crystal window with its hilt. The corridor oppressed him. Beyond the windows, the dead brains drifted. He ran on. 'You should have done it,'whispered Birkin Grif in the soft spaces of his skull; and, 'OUROBUNDOS!'giggled the insane door, as he fell through it and in to the desert wind. His cloak cracking..
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M. John Harrison |
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7e75a9f
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The first time we spoke, Mr. Ambraysas told me, 'Identity is not negotiable. An identity you have achieved by agreement is always a prison.
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identity
negotiable
prison
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M. John Harrison |