Top 100 M.R. Carey Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There can’t be any rules in the telling of stories... as to the happiness or sadness of it, that depends where you’re standing.”

— M.R. Carey

52. “I learned since then, and paid a price to learn, it that them as laid claim to great wisdom most often got nothing in their store but bare scrapings. And by the same token, them as think they’re ignorant think it because they can see the edges of what they know, which you can only see when what you know is tall enough to stand on, and take a look around.”

— M.R. Carey

53. “They talk for a little while longer about the things that have happened, wrapping the violence up in careful, delicate words so it feels less horrible. 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. She wishes she could do that with her big secret.”

— M.R. Carey

54. “It was a sweet apology, and furthermore I seen now how Spinner did the thing with the knife and the fork to turn Haijon’s thoughts away from the hurt she done him. I admired her cleverness in that, which was not a sly cleverness but a thoughtful and a gentle one. That Spinner could be gentle or fierce by turns whenever there was need for one or for the other was part of who she was, and part of why I loved her.”

— M.R. Carey

55. “Sanity is a suspended state, moored in nothing but itself. You test the ground an inch in front of you, move forward as though it’s solid. But the whole world is in freefall and you’re in freefall with it.”

— M.R. Carey

56. “Qui tacet consentire. If you don’t say no, you just said yes. He.”

— M.R. Carey

57. “There is a game that old people play that is really no game at all. They look at how the world is now, and remember how it was, and those two things come more and more to seem like a hell and a heaven.”

— M.R. Carey

58. “But you can be led into believing a thing just by wanting it too much.”

— M.R. Carey

59. “The point of history, the very essence of it as a field of study, is to find correspondences. 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

60. “Jess wasn’t religious. Not even a little bit. She thought all gods were basically big bully-boy cops dreamed up by people who wanted the laws they liked on Earth to be true everywhere else.”

— M.R. Carey

61. “They walk on endlessly. Time elongates, fractures, rewinds and replays in stuttering moments that – while they have no coherent internal logic – all seem drearily familiar and inevitable.”

— M.R. Carey

62. “Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It’s an emergent property of a very complicated system.”

— M.R. Carey

63. “She likes the idea of saving Miss Justineau so much that it becomes her favourite thought. She thinks about it whenever she’s not thinking about anything else.”

— M.R. Carey

64. “It’s not often our hearts sing out of tune with each other.”

— M.R. Carey

65. “He frigging flat-out hates frivolous, thoughtless people who dance across the surface of the world without looking down.”

— M.R. Carey

66. “You look at the past so that you can understand it, and through it you come to a better understanding of your own time. If you’re lucky, sometimes you can even extrapolate to possible futures.”

— M.R. Carey

67. “It’s called fascism, Koli-bou. It’s like ra-ra skirts and flared trousers. People get all hot for it and make themselves look ridiculous, then when the fad blows over they pretend they were never that into it.”

— M.R. Carey

68. “She falters into silence, waits to be told that she’s cashiered. It will be a relief. It will all be over. She’ll have taken it as far as she can, and she’ll have lost, and they’ll send her away. It will become somebody else’s problem. Of course she’d save the kids if she could, if there was any way, but you can’t save people from the world. There’s nowhere else to take them.”

— M.R. Carey

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

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

— M.R. Carey

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

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

— M.R. Carey

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— M.R. Carey

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

— M.R. Carey

86. “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

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

— M.R. Carey

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

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

— M.R. Carey

96. “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

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

— M.R. Carey

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

— 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