The End of Mr. Y Quotes

“Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“If something wants to be a story, it will be.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“I pray for meaning. I pray for the limits of reality to become clear. For a world – and a type of being – that makes sense. I pray for a life after death that is not like this life. I pray for the end of mystery. What would a life be like with all the mysteries solved? If there were no questions, there’d be no stories. If there were no stories, there’d be no language. If there was no language there’d be no . . . What?”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“Over to my left is the big grey wall in front of the church.

Are we the Thoughts of God? a poster asks.

No, I realise. It's the reverse. ”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“So if we're all quarks and electrons ..." he begins.

What?"

We could make love and it would be nothing more than quarks and electrons rubbing together."

Better than that," I say. "Nothing really 'rubs together' in the microscopic world. Matter never really touches other matter, so we could make love without any of our atoms touching at all. Remember that electrons sit on the outside of atoms, repelling other electrons. So we could make love and actually repel each other at the same time.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“Oh fuck. It’s like period pain in my head. It’s toothache of the brain.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“Sometimes I wake up with such an immense sense of disappointment that I can hardly breathe.”
― scarlett thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“Homeopaths argue that water has a memory.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“And every one of these events is connected. But not by luck: it's pure cause and effect.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“The sky was the colour of sad weddings.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“I wonder at what point my life swerved to avoid that, and if that life would have been nicer than the one I've got.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“I don’t have bionic arms, and I have absolutely no stamina. Once I rubbed out the penciled-in marginalia of a hundred pages of a book that I wanted to photocopy (long story) and afterwards it felt like I’d been wanking off a giant for a hundred years.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“Sometimes I like to think I live with ghosts. Not from my past, but wispy bits of ideas and books that hang in the air like silk puppets. Sometimes I think I see my own ideas, floating around too, but they usually don't last that long. They're more like mayflies; they're born, big and gleaming, and then they fly around, buzzing like crazy before they fall to the floor, dead, about twenty four hours later.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“If someone who had given up his whole life to thinking about goodness and rightness and truth and still expected nuns to cook him his fish fingers (because after all, nuns haven't got anything else better to do, and none of them are ever going to be priests or become the Pope, because women aren't good enough for that), then something was very wrong. How could he have missed the bit about everyone being equal in the eyes of God?”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“Někdy si ráda představuju, že bydlím s přízraky. Ne s těmi ze své minulosti - v takové nevěřím -, ale s průhlednými kusy myšlenek a knih visícími ve vzduchu jako hedvábné loutky.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“Sometimes I wake up with such an immense sense of disappointment that I can hardly breathe. Usually nothing has obviously triggered it and I put it down to some combination of an unhappy childhood and bad dreams (those two things go very well together).”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“Nothing means anything but you still have to follow the rules.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“I feel like crying. There's something so sad about broken concrete.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“I hate the honesty of the moring; the time before your consiousness switches on the light and gets rid of all the nasty shadows.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“Can something be created in language independently of the people who use the language? Can language become a self-replicating system or …’ I’m drunk, I suddenly realise, so I shut up. But”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End Of Mr. Y

“Already, though, the fiction has become blurred. Am I Mr. Y? Do I have to be for the book to work? When I was a kid I always made an agreement with myself never to identify with main protagonists, because bad things or, more troublingly, big things tended to happen to them and I couldn’t cope with the feeling that these things were also happening to me, to the self that you project into fiction when you read. So I would decide on a secondary character that I would ‘be’ for the duration of the book. Sometimes I died; sometimes I turned out to be evil. But I never had to take centre stage. Now I’m older, I read more conventionally. Right now I’m scared for Mr. Y/me and I feel as though it must be raining outside, even though it isn’t.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End Of Mr. Y

“My mind now has a celebration party and a funeral going on in the same room.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“Heather cocks her head to one side as if she's trying to make the information roll down a hill in her mind and come to rest in a place she can access it.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“There's a woman in the bakery who smiles at me as if everyone I've ever known has just died.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“I sit up in bed slowly, feeling the disappointment trickle away like puddles after a rain shower.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“It's only the beginning of January, but some daffodils and snowdrops have made it through the earth and stand wetly in little rows by the path. The bus stop is depressing; there's a line of people looking as cold and fragile as the line of flowers [...]”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“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.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y