Top 40 M.T. Anderson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”

— M.T. Anderson

2. “You’ll never hear interesting stories if you don’t ask questions. And there are interesting stories everywhere. Even the most boring person has one interesting story.”

— M.T. Anderson

3. “There’s an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we’re all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there’s nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.”

— M.T. Anderson

4. “We Americans,” he said, “are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they were produced, or what happens to them” – he pointed at his daughter – “what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.”

— M.T. Anderson

5. “No one with feeds thinks about it,” she said. “When you have the feed all your life, you’re brought up to not think about things. Like them never telling you that it’s a republic and not a democracy. It’s something that makes me angry, what people don’t know about these days. Because of the feed, we’re raising a nation of idiots. Ignorant, self-centered idiots.”

— M.T. Anderson

6. “I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it’s like some kind of brain surgery, and you have to tweak exactly the right part of the lobe. except with talking, it’s more like brain surgery with old, rusted skewers and things, and maybe like those things you use to eat lobster, but brown. And you have to get exactly the right place, and you’re touching around in the brain, But the patient, she keeps jumping and saying ow.”

— M.T. Anderson

7. “I am messaging you to say that I love you, and that you’re completely wrong about me thinking you’re stupid. I always thought you could teach me things. I was always waiting. You’re not like the others. You say things that no one expects you to. You think you’re stupid. You want to be stupid. But you’re someone people could learn from.”

— M.T. Anderson

8. “Some love is so powerful after all, that it must always include sadness, because encrypted within it is the knowledge that someday it will come to an end.”

— M.T. Anderson

9. “We thought there was a great distance between the future and us, and now here we are, falling through it.”

— M.T. Anderson

10. “We are the nation of dreams. We are seers. We are wizards. We speak in visions. Our letters are like flocks of doves, released from under our hats. We have only to stretch out our hand and desire, and what we wish for settles like a kerchief in our palm. We are a race of sorcerers, enchanters. We are Atlantis. We are the wizard-isle of Mu.”

— M.T. Anderson

11. “There are times when friendship feels like running down a hill together as fast as you can, jumping over things, spinning around, and you don’t care where you’re going, and you don’t care where you’ve come from, because all that matters is speed, and the hands holding your hands.”

— M.T. Anderson

12. “How doth all that seeks to rise burn itself to nothing.”

— M.T. Anderson

13. “It’s important to see who you’re growing into and who you used to be.”

— M.T. Anderson

14. “Then it was this big thing. She was like, ‘I never want to see you again’, and I was like, ‘Fine. Okay? Fine. Then get some special goggles.”

— M.T. Anderson

15. “The hand that records is also what makes everything unclear.”

— M.T. Anderson

16. “But we glared into each other’s eyes like men who have ruined each other already, and who only wait to make the full disaster known.”

— M.T. Anderson

17. “We were as strangers, in the moment-as intimate as strangers-for strangers know more of us, and can judge of us more without reproach than ever those we love.”

— M.T. Anderson

18. “Gradually, like the emigration of an insidious, phantom population, Leningrad belonged more to the dead than to the living. The dead watched over streets and sat in snow-swamped buses. Whole apartment buildings were tenanted by them, where in broken rooms, dead families sat waiting at tables. Their dominion spread room by room, like lights going out in evening.”

— M.T. Anderson

19. “I came into the world alone.” She picked up her shoe and scratched the crust out of the tread. She said, “I didn’t want to go out of it alone.”

— M.T. Anderson

20. “When we read tales of atrocity, we all want to be the ones who stood firm, who would not bend, who shouted the truth in the face of the dictator... It is easy for us all to imagine we are heroes when we are sitting in our kitchens, dreaming of distant suffering.”

— M.T. Anderson

21. “Strangely enough, doctors and nurses noted that activity actually prolonged life, when it should have shortened it. Those who lay down and tried to conserve energy often were the ones who trailed off and died first.”

— M.T. Anderson

22. “Who do we seek, my spies? Again and again, I announce to the world: I. M. Realdom! I. M. Realdom! I. M. Realdom! I cannot say it too often! Do you have that?”

— M.T. Anderson

23. “Someday I’ll give it to her. When everything is better. The natural history of her life, sketched out, because nothing means as much until it has vanished.”

— M.T. Anderson

24. “It smelled like the country. It was a filet mignon farm, all of it, and the tissue spread for miles around the paths where we were walking. It was like these huge hedges of red all around us, with these beautiful marble patterns running through them. They had these tubes, they were bringing the tissue blood, and we would see all the blood running around, up and down. It was really interesting. I like to see how things are made, and to understand where they come from.”

— M.T. Anderson

25. “It is ever the lot of children to accept their circumstances as universal, and their particularities as general.”

— M.T. Anderson

26. “Stalin was not merely trying to remove political enemies. He was not merely trying to terrorize the country into submission. He was trying to break down all social structure that did not emanate from him, and to create a new people, no longer Homo sapiens, but Homo sovieticus, the New Man of Communism.”

— M.T. Anderson

27. “If you have read many adventure novels, you’ll know that spies spend about half of their time in the sewers. They run along sewer tunnels, shooting. They find secret hideaways in sewers. They take weird funeral barges through sewers, poled along by old men in hoods. In fact, if a spy’s kid wants to get a message to their mom or dad, the easiest way to do it is just to flush it down the toilet.”

— M.T. Anderson

28. “On the artillery shells produced in Leningrad, workers stenciled messages to the Germans: “For the blood of our workers,” “For our children’s anguish,” and “For our murdered friends.”

— M.T. Anderson

29. “Those accustomed to failure fear the novelty of success. Those taught the lessons of subordination are oft timid in the school of self-service.”

— M.T. Anderson

30. “To participate, then, in the pomp of the orchestra, in the full scintillation thereof, was in the highest degree thrilling. Is this not the image of the perfect republic – each instrument singing its wonted melody, endeavoring at once to express its part, and, in the same instance to conform its voice to the conversation of the whole?”

— M.T. Anderson

31. “Lily knew what he meant. She loved places that people had forgotten, like the old gas station rotting on the edge of the forest in Pelt, all gray wood and brown metal. She liked to walk there sometimes and imagine that during tempests the king of the forest, dry leaves swirling around his motorcycle, would skid to a halt and demand unleaded gas from shadowy attendants while a mossy-faced knight sat in his sidecar.”

— M.T. Anderson

32. “I believe,′ said Marcus Furius, ’that an order of male virgins who never see the light of day would be ideal for the operation of a computing machine such as this.”

— M.T. Anderson

33. “History is not simply the great tumults and tragedies but the accumulation of tiny moments and gestures.”

— M.T. Anderson

34. “You know who you should ask about this? My pal Ray, who works with me. He could tell you all about this.” Lily’s dad nodded. “Except he was taken out of the office a few days ago with his hands tied behind his back and a bandanna tied as a gag on his mouth.” Her father thought for a second. “Huh. He hasn’t been in to work since. I wonder if he has the flu.”

— M.T. Anderson

35. “Most symphonies, however, are wordless. They are built only of tones, nonlinguistic sounds vibrating in the air, and somehow, we take them to heart and feel that they speak to us more deeply than words ever could. Cultures make up certain rules for music that we learn without even recognizing them; for example, in the West, we have decided that music in minor keys tends to sound sad or anxious, while music in major keys conveys confidence, triumph. Other cultures have made other decisions.”

— M.T. Anderson

36. “We live by devouring those we love. How can we help it? They’re the ones within closest reach.”

— M.T. Anderson

37. “Even the basic facts of Dmitri Shostakovich’s life are often contested, as a glance through the end notes of this book attests. How do we reconstruct the story of someone who lived in a period in which everyone had an excuse to lie, evade, accuse, or keep silent?”

— M.T. Anderson

38. “What was the human animal in the midst of the siege? An herbivore that crawled on all fours, browsing on dirty grasses. A predator that hunted alone or in packs. A social animal that spoke of noble art and wound violin strings from the guts of dead sheep and pigs. A creature with canine teeth for tearing, but with a tongue for speaking. A mouth that could devour or sing.”

— M.T. Anderson

39. “The only thing worse than the thought it may all come tumbling down is the thought that we may go on like this forever.”

— M.T. Anderson

40. “One of the best things about road-tripping with monks is that monks are used to repeating chants over and over and over, so they really don’t mind songs like ‘Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall’ or ‘The Song That Never Ends.”

— M.T. Anderson

41. “Tomorrow is the benefit dinner for the Save the Chameleon Fund. The Decentville Zoo thinks their chameleons are either dead, missing, or plaid.”

— M.T. Anderson

42. “I could still smell the hospital in my nose. It wasn’t anything around me. It was her. I stopped breathing, but the smell was still there. I held my breath.”

— M.T. Anderson

43. “He says the language is dying. He thinks words are being debased. So he tries to speak entirely in weird words and irony, so no one can simplify anything he says.”

— M.T. Anderson

44. “You were useful... But just because you’re useful to the wealthy doesn’t mean they’ll reward you. It just means they’ll use you.”

— M.T. Anderson

45. “We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.”

— M.T. Anderson