Top 100 M.R. Carey Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “You have a life and then it ends and you’re dead. Living it is the point, not proving to other people that you were there.”

— M.R. Carey

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

— M.R. Carey

53. “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

54. “She didn’t say knowed, she said known, just like she’d said chamber instead of room. It was how they said those things in the old times, and it made her words seem heavier somehow. Like they was hard, solid things and kept right on standing there in the air after she was done saying them.”

— M.R. Carey

55. “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

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

— M.R. Carey

57. “Do we always fret about our partners’ exes? he wonders. And do we extend that to everyone they knew before they met us? Is it their whole past we’re jealous of, as though we want them to be born again when we walk into their lives? It’s a depressing thought. He has believed himself to be bigger than that, and a whole lot more rational.”

— M.R. Carey

58. “Knowing the date is reassuring in some way she can’t quite figure out. It’s like it gives her a secret power–like she’s in control of a little piece of the world. It’s not until then that she realises she’s never had that feeling before.”

— M.R. Carey

59. “And what you got to do when the future comes is open your arms to it. For that’s where life is, and if you look for it anywhere else, you’re gonna come home empty-handed.”

— M.R. Carey

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

— M.R. Carey

61. “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

62. “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

63. “It’s absolutely necessary to know who you are, as the basis for knowing anything else.”

— M.R. Carey

64. “Judging is what them that listen does for them that tell, whether it’s wanted or not. But the truth is I don’t.”

— M.R. Carey

65. “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

66. “His stomach lurches. He has a sense, for the first time in his soldiering career, of what a war crime might look like from the inside. And it’s not him who’s the criminal, or even Caldwell. It’s Justineau. And Mailer. And that drunken bastard Whitaker, and all the rest of them. Caldwell, she’s just a butcher. She’s Sweeney Todd, with a barber’s chair and a straight razor. She didn’t spend years twisting kids’ brains into pretzels.”

— M.R. Carey

67. “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

68. “They think he doesn’t understand. That he can’t see. They can’t see him.”

— M.R. Carey

69. “I heard her say once that though many a man was worth a tumble, there wasn’t one in a hundred was worth living with.”

— M.R. Carey

70. “You have a life and then it ends and you’re dead. Living it is the point, not proving to other people that you were there. The whole thing is really just water pouring down a plughole, but that’s absolutely fine. Standing water gets stagnant.”

— M.R. Carey

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “Like blood. Like something about her is wounded, and not healing, and hurting her all the time.”

— M.R. Carey

75. “People only make sense from the inside, Foss has found. And that’s if you’re lucky.”

— M.R. Carey

76. “Triumph of hope over experience,” Parks observes. “Nostalgia,” Dr Caldwell says categorically. “The psychological comfort outweighs the logical objections. Everybody needs a security blanket.” Only idiots, Parks thinks. Personally, he tends to see security in much less abstract terms. Gallagher.”

— M.R. Carey

77. “Out of my way, Private, or your brains go public.”

— M.R. Carey

78. “Humankind was masters of the whole world once, wasn’t they? That’s what the database says. We was masters of trees, masters of tech, masters of birds and beasts and earth and sky and everything. “And look what we did, Jon. Look what a dead-god-damned mess we made of it. 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

79. “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

80. “The facts are in the outside world. You can verify them with your senses or with objective tests. The truth is something that people build inside their heads, using the facts as raw materials. And sometimes the facts get bent or broken in the process.”

— M.R. Carey

81. “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

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

— M.R. Carey

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

— M.R. Carey

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “People need to know what was done and by who. They need to know how their present grows out of this past, or else they’re no more than windblown seeds.”

— M.R. Carey

89. “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

90. “It rains on the just and the unjust. Nothing you can do but turn your collar up.”

— M.R. Carey

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

— M.R. Carey

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

— M.R. Carey

93. “Gallagher looks from one of them to the other, not sure what’s going on. He’s too young to remember money. Justineau starts in on an explanation, then shakes her head and gives it up. “Why would I ruin your innocence?” she says. “There.”

— M.R. Carey

94. “Grief’s not a debt we owe. It wells up or it doesn’t.”

— M.R. Carey

95. “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

96. “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

97. “The world is information. An endless torrent. Whatever escapes you becomes something you will never completely understand.”

— M.R. Carey

98. “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

99. “It’s a strange thing to wake up not knowing who you are.”

— M.R. Carey

100. “I know this much though: anyone who talks about the right way to live, as if there was only just the one, is blind in one eye or maybe both and is not worth listening to.”

— M.R. Carey