Top 100 M.R. Carey Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The world we got now is one we builded with our own hands, and as far as I can see it’s in a pretty sorry state. That’s what comes of thinking you’re the master and the world’s just there to serve you.”

— M.R. Carey

2. “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

3. “Pain has no agenda at all. It teaches us nothing, except what hurts. And if you can’t avoid the things that hurt then what use is the lesson?”

— M.R. Carey

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “She is an anomaly. Anomalies explode old theories and engender new ones. They are dangerous and glorious. Greaves.”

— M.R. Carey

8. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Which is faulty learning because it always comes.”

— M.R. Carey

9. “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

10. “It’s a little bit like a cow listening to a recipe for beef stew.”

— M.R. Carey

11. “You shouldn’t kill a man without being aware of the possibilities, the futures, you’re snuffing out. The younger the target, the more of those possible futures there are. Killing a child is like killing a vast multitude.”

— M.R. Carey

12. “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

13. “It never stops amazing me how a story can deliver you out of your own self, even in the worst of times.”

— M.R. Carey

14. “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

15. “Well, there’s something called the law of unintended consequences. I don’t think it’s really a law, but people do a lot of things that seem smart at the time and then turn out to be terrible mistakes.”

— M.R. Carey

16. “I had made so many mistakes since then, I couldn’t even count them no more. If I could unpick my whole life like a pattern in wove cloth, I would do it in a heartbeat. But life’s not forgiving either, and we only get one chance to weave what pattern we can.”

— M.R. Carey

17. “Denial is a stage she goes through very quickly indeed, because her reason strikes down the demeaning, treacherous thought as quickly as it rises. There’s no point in denying the truth when the truth is self-evident. There’s no point in denying the truth even if you have to wade through thorn thickets and minefields to get to it. 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

18. “Wherever you tried to draw the line they were already inside it.”

— M.R. Carey

19. “To see death coming and be able to look it in the face is part of what human beings gained when they took the path that led them away from the rest of the living kingdoms. Part of what they lost, too, no doubt.”

— M.R. Carey

20. “And the sun comes out, like a kiss on the cheek from God.”

— M.R. Carey

21. “I don’t like people very much. I’m all in favour of them as a concept, but I don’t get on with them at all when I have to mix with them.”

— M.R. Carey

22. “Suddenly she’s an ant all scrunched up on the floor of that world. A static atom in a sea of change. The immensity of earth envelops her, and enters into her. She sips it, with each gulp of heady, supercharged atmosphere.”

— M.R. Carey

23. “Even the air seems to have a smell – earthy and rich and complicated, made out of things living nd things dying and things long dead. The smell of the world where nothing stops moving, nothing stays the same.”

— M.R. Carey

24. “Tomorrow would do, I thought. And like most people who think that, I was dead wrong. There’s only ever one day that matters, and it moves along with you.”

— M.R. Carey

25. “Literary puns. She had to admit, she did find that pretty hot.”

— M.R. Carey

26. “Overthrow is a nicely judged word. It suggests a wrestler being flung to the mat. That only happens when you move outside your centre of gravity. Your enemy can’t throw you if you have your feet firmly planted. Which.”

— M.R. Carey

27. “They are in hell, but the devil is on their side.”

— M.R. Carey

28. “I’ve got to do something. I can’t just sit here until the world ends. It will take too long.”

— M.R. Carey

29. “When you’re a mile outside the limits of your competence, there is some comfort to be had in sounding like you know what you’re doing.”

— M.R. Carey

30. “You look at the past so that you can understand it, and through it you come to a better understanding of your own time.”

— M.R. Carey

31. “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

32. “Stock was a rationalist and an atheist. Most of the time she saw the world as a big machine where things just played themselves out. Anonymous forces, impersonal powers, action and reaction, cause and effect. It would be comforting to live in a world that had order and purpose in it, which she supposed was why so many people pretended they did.”

— M.R. Carey

33. “The daytime burns with a single fire, and a lot of the time it burns fitfully. The night is a million suns exploding all at once, igniting the whole sky.”

— M.R. Carey

34. “Rough edges were what you needed because they were what you sharpened yourself against. Nobody ever got sharp from lying in a feather bed.”

— M.R. Carey

35. “She could be as selfish as she’s always been, and forgive herself the way everybody else does, and wake up every day as clean as if she’d just been born.”

— M.R. Carey

36. “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

37. “In any event, he has traded power for a clean conscience and ended up with neither.”

— M.R. Carey

38. “Loyalty is just the wheels on the bus... meaning that it keeps things moving but it’s neutral when it comes to the direction they move in.”

— M.R. Carey

39. “If everyone always knows what they’re doing and acts in a perfectly rational way, how did most of world history happen?”

— M.R. Carey

40. “Evidence is evidence, Your Honour. Like water, it finds its level.”

— M.R. Carey

41. “In olden times, it meant the long dark of winter was finally over, and things would start growing again and the world would be renewed. The solstice was the promise–that the days wouldn’t just keep on getting shorter until they disappeared altogether. The equinox was the day when the promise was fulfilled.”

— M.R. Carey

42. “To teach what you were taught is the very heart of life, and gives you faith that life will hold.”

— M.R. Carey

43. “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

44. “Some things come on you too fast for you to understand them when they’re happening. And when you try to understand them afterwards you put them together any way you can, but you get it wrong.”

— M.R. Carey

45. “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

46. “Maybe because she’s got a crush on me, and all love is as blind as it needs to be.”

— M.R. Carey

47. “It was before there were any words; there were just things without names, and things without names don’t stay in your mind. They fall out, and then they’re gone.”

— M.R. Carey

48. “He had already learned to read, but now he learned the pleasure of stories which is like no other pleasure – the experience of slipping sideways into another world and living there for as long as you want to.”

— M.R. Carey

49. “I just read a list of the hundred things you should do before you die. I was kind of surprised to see that shouting for help wasn’t in there.”

— M.R. Carey

50. “Miraculously and very suddenly the baby stops crying at this point, as though human contact was all it wanted. As though all its sorrows came down to being alone. Perhaps that’s true of everyone.”

— M.R. Carey