Scarlett Thomas Quotes

One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.

Not all events are stories.

Max always mumbles; not in a shy way, but rather as if he's telling you what it will cost to take out your worst enemy, or how much you'd have to pay to rig a horse race.

What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon.

In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.

There's something romantic about it, of course, in the way only other people's lives can be.

I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.

People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning.

The sky is grey, with a thin TV-static drizzle that hangs in the air like it's been freeze-framed.

Child, all books are magic. Just think,' he said, 'about what books make people do. People go to war on the basis of what they read in books. They believe in "facts" just because they are written down. They decide to adopt political systems, to travel to one place rather than another, to give up their job and go on a great adventure, to love or to hate. All books have tremendous power. And power is magic.' 'But are these books really magic...?