Top 70 Natasha Pulley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I don’t tolerate you. I can’t breathe when you’re not here, I can’t think, I can’t write music properly, I spend my whole bloody life waiting for the post.”

— Natasha Pulley

2. “When a sign says don’t walk on the grass, one hops.’ He.”

— Natasha Pulley

3. “Your science can save a man’s life, but imagination makes it worth living.”

— Natasha Pulley

4. “In Japan, first names are only for who you’re married to, or if you’re being rude,′ the watchmaker explained.”

— Natasha Pulley

5. “He was from Glasgow. Everything past “good morning” was a blur.”

— Natasha Pulley

6. “But Spanish and English aren’t different languages, only extreme dialects of Latin. It’s almost possible to translate word for word. Translation from a language unrelated to English is nothing to do with equivalent words. Whenever I’d tried to do that in Chinese I’d come out with unbroken nonsense. I had to forget the English, hang the meaning up in a well-lit gallery, stare at it hard, then describe it afresh.”

— Natasha Pulley

7. “Being mad isn’t an excuse for being vague. Can we at least have specific madness?”

— Natasha Pulley

8. “People are like bees. They’re all workers who could be queens, with the right stuff, but once a queen-making has begun, it can’t be reversed. A bee that’s halfway a queen can’t turn back into a worker. She’d starve. She must keep growing and then she must leave.”

— Natasha Pulley

9. “The safest way to success is to write according to the capacity of the stupidest member of the audience.”

— Natasha Pulley

10. “Mori smiled properly. The lines around his eyes were deeper than usual now. They made him look like an old photograph of a young man, often crushed, but ironed carefully so that only the ghosts of the marks remained.”

— Natasha Pulley

11. “Under the gas lamps, mist pawed at the windows of the closed shops, which became steadily shabbier nearer home. It was such a smooth ruination that he could have been walking forward through time, watching the same buildings age five years with every step, all still as a museum.”

— Natasha Pulley

12. “It was the great evil of plays that every character had some kind of purpose. Absorb too much of them, and you could go about believing there was something wrong with you if you drifted unremarked towards your thirties, and coasted into a quiet beach of no interest to anyone.”

— Natasha Pulley

13. “It is not summer, England doesn’t have summer, it has continuous autumn with a fortnight’s variation here and there.”

— Natasha Pulley

14. “Science had to have some mystery otherwise everyone would find out how simple it was.”

— Natasha Pulley

15. “Stop looking at it as an impossible thing and start looking at it as a thing that must be done.”

— Natasha Pulley

16. “People shouldn’t be throwing away their history when it’s still doing archery practice forty miles up the road.”

— Natasha Pulley

17. “She waited by the blackboard, trying to scrape up enough of her abysmal Japanese to ask what was going on. Lectures were always in English, which was just as well, because she had the linguistic capability of a sea cucumber. As far as she could tell, the word for ‘husband’ and the word for ‘prisoner’ were identical. Half the faculty were still worried that she’d got Baron Matsumoto locked away in her attic.”

— Natasha Pulley

18. “All I could think was that the border was a clever idea. It might as well have been Hadrian’s Wall, but they had taken the idea and distilled it down to all that was actually required of a wall in a perfectly policed world: a line on the ground.”

— Natasha Pulley

19. “I’m a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don’t.”

— Natasha Pulley

20. “Chivalry – Kuroda, you know when women put vegetables on a spoon and zoom it round so their kids think it’s a magic butterfly or something? Chivalry is just what your mum called being a decent human being so you’d feel like a really good boy when you were nice to people. Don’t say it to grown-ups.”

— Natasha Pulley

21. “My uncle is a phrenologist and says that the shape of his skull is typical of a liar.”

— Natasha Pulley

22. “Mori looked across and was, briefly, a languageless, inhuman thing rescued from the sea and asked for an impious favour.”

— Natasha Pulley

23. “It was embarrassing to be associated with a man who thought Newton was a town.”

— Natasha Pulley

24. “Being solitary isn’t a disease that needs a cure.”

— Natasha Pulley

25. “Irony was a difficult thing to catch in a new language, and more so because not all languages had it, not even all local languages.”

— Natasha Pulley

26. “She felt suddenly as though she had thrown a stone, badly aimed, but still a stone, at a navy sniper.”

— Natasha Pulley

27. “You’re my family! You were family before any of them. I’ve missed you even when I didn’t remember you. Everything I’ve done since losing you has been about getting back to you. And I know I’ve left you behind before for other families, but not this time. I can’t do it again.”

— Natasha Pulley

28. “He had thought it had all gone, but all he had done was lock himself up in a few little rooms and assume the rest of the house had fallen down.”

— Natasha Pulley

29. “Englishmen were rained on too often to come up with anything that imaginative.”

— Natasha Pulley

30. “The creeping sense that he might have seen him reading the book came up from the ground, but that was more anxiety than evidence.”

— Natasha Pulley

31. “Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said ‘do not walk on the grass’, one hopped. Anybody who didn’t had failed to understand what Oxford was.”

— Natasha Pulley

32. “Thaniel wondered if real geisha painted themselves white so that it was harder to see how angry they must be all the time.”

— Natasha Pulley

33. “There was a cheer, and he took his first deep breath for months. He hadn’t been aware of breathing shallowly. It had happened gradually; someone had put a penny on his chest every hour since November, and now the weight of thousands of pennies had lifted at once.”

— Natasha Pulley

34. “The gold caught the ember-light and shone the colour of a human voice.”

— Natasha Pulley

35. “It’s good for a person to be terrorized by a goat. Hard to get high and mighty when there’s something chasing you for vegetables.”

— Natasha Pulley

36. “But he hadn’t realized that grace is not a thing you performed, but a weight you carried.”

— Natasha Pulley

37. “He looked worried, like he had just watched a boy flicking pebbles at something in a zoo with flimsy fences.”

— Natasha Pulley

38. “Aren’t you listening to him?’ ‘Of course I’m not listening to him.”

— Natasha Pulley

39. “There are things it’s hard to think in English. There’s not a word. You can think them but you can’t explain properly and the thought just fogs away because you can’t call it anything.”

— Natasha Pulley

40. “Are you going to enlighten me about London now? What’s there? What’s so damn important?” “A friend, like I said.” “There isn’t.” “He hasn’t met me yet.”

— Natasha Pulley

41. “A family of skeletons leaned over an anatomy book that had proven so interesting that being dead hadn’t distracted them.”

— Natasha Pulley

42. “Home. It was coming up through the deck.”

— Natasha Pulley

43. “The truth was that he loved Mori so hopelessly he could have found a way to excuse cemeteries of dead wives.”

— Natasha Pulley

44. “I didn’t say that I thought Clem was a bad translator, or that I didn’t believe there was any such thing as an impassable gulf in the thinking of two human beings. Of course you couldn’t translate everything, but you could damn well explicate, particularly if you both spoke such a sprawling monster of a language as English.”

— Natasha Pulley

45. “I think you’re the same thing in three different lights.”

— Natasha Pulley

46. “Middle-class people, Alice explained, hadn’t been in the world enough to know anything, and it was best to smile and nod and ignore them.”

— Natasha Pulley

47. “Mori had a habit of walking through traffic as though he couldn’t see it.”

— Natasha Pulley

48. “His entire soul cramped. His heart locked and he couldn’t breathe, never mind move, and everything in him was shrieking as if he’d thrust his hand into a fire. The second he stopped trying to leave, it eased.”

— Natasha Pulley

49. “The way to not sink into self-pity and despair – the way to not die – was to look forward to things. Anything; the tinier the better, because then you were more likely to get it. The patterns of ice on the water barrels, the feeling of holding a hot mug. Anything to stop the onset of the terrible docility that came before you gave up. Collect enough bright things, and it was possible to have a good day.”

— Natasha Pulley

50. “He was older; even if they had all been the same age, he would still have been older.”

— Natasha Pulley