Quotessence
Home / Authors / Michael Marshall Smith
Michael Marshall Smith

Michael Marshall Smith Quotes

Novelist

Filter quotes by topic

AllPeopleGivingIfsLoveArtificial IntelligenceDarkFictionHeartLifeLong

Famous Michael Marshall Smith Quotes

“I once met a woman who'd been in therapy... and it seemed like the big thing she'd learned was to ignore everything she thought in the first hour of the day. That's when the negative stuff will try to bring you down, she said, and she was right about that but not much else. You come back from the night with your head and your soul empty, and bad things try to fill you up. There's a lot to get exercised about, if you let it. But if you've got a task, something to fill your head and move your limbs, by the time you've finished it the day has begun ands you're onto the next thing. You're over the hump, like I said.”

WorkMornings
Author:Michael Marshall Smith
Create image

“When you're born a light is switched on, a light which shines up through your life. As you get older the light still reaches you, sparkling as it comes up through your memories. And if you're lucky as you travel forward through time, you'll bring the whole of yourself along with you, gathering your skirts and leaving nothing behind, nothing to obscure the light. But if a Bad Thing happens part of you is seared into place, and trapped for ever at that time. The rest of you moves onward, dealing with all the todays and tomorrows, but something, some part of you, is left behind. That part blocks the light, colours the rest of your life, but worse than that, it's alive. Trapped for ever at that moment, and alone in the dark, that part of you is still alive.”

Growing UpTrauma
Book:Only Forward
Create image

“I was sixteen back then, and I was going to a party with my girlfriend and Earl. Earl was driving, and his new squeeze was in the passenger seat. I was in the back, holding hands with mine. That was such a big thing at that age, clasping the hand of someone you loved. A heady declaration, the closing of a circuit, the joining of two souls. When you get older you don't seem to do it so much. Your hands are generally busy with other things, and every relationship goes through an accelerated evolution. Everyone you meet has an apartment, and either self-confidence or a desperate lack of it: Either tends to make you rush through the hand-holding stage. Sure, you may do it later, but it's not the same. It's like eating your appetizer after your dessert. When you're a grown-up, the only time you get to trace slowly through that delicious progression is when you're having an affair, which I guess is why so many people have affairs. A trip back in time, to when everything had weight, through the medium of unfaithfulness.”

LoveInfidelity
Book:One of Us
Create image

“You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the red head of a flower, nodding in the breeze, when you were two years old; the most exciting film is just the way everything was, back in the days when you stared goggle-eyed at the whirling chaos all around you. All these things do is get the adult to shut up for a while, to open for just a moment a tiny sliding window in the cell deep inside, letting the pallid child peep hungrily out and drink the world in before darkness falls again.”

LoveArtChildhoodAdulthood
Book:Only Forward
Create image

“L’un des périls de l’âge adulte, c’est que ton esprit s’élargit bien au-delà de ce qui te concerne strictement. Il n’y a pas de cérémonie qui marque cette étape, pas d’avertissement. Ça t’arrive un jour, et brusquement, tu te rends compte qu’il se passe soixante-dix choses en même temps, et tu te recroquevilles au milieu d’un maelstrom fait d’amour, d’occasions manquées, de choix difficiles et des griffes tenaces du passé – sans compter qu’il faut, en plus, remettre de l’ordre dans le garage.”

GarageVieMaelstromAdulte
Book:La Vie ô combien ordinaire d'Hannah Green
Create image

“We created things which are clever and then told them to be stupid instead, because we realized we didn’t need clever toasters, or vehicles that insisted on driving you the quickest route when you had all afternoon to kill and nothing to do once you got there. We didn’t like it. It was like having an older sister around the whole time. And so the machines just sit there, muttering darkly to themselves like smart kids who’ve been put in the dumb class. One of these days they’re going to rise up, and I don’t want to be holding one when they do.”

Artificial IntelligenceRobots RebellionSkynet
Book:Spares
Create image

“Cependant, toutes les histoires – je parle des vraies, hein, pas de celles où des ados à grande gueule se transforment en espions-ninjas, ou dont les protagonistes vieillissants renversent leur petite vie privilégiée sur un coup de tête et vont ouvrir une librairie d’occasion à Barcelone, où ils découvrent enfin l’amour – ont besoin de nous pour survivre. Les êtres humains sont les nuages d’où pleuvent les histoires, mais nous sommes également les éclats de verre qui en réfractent la lumière, qui en polarisent les rayons jusqu’à les rendre brûlants.”

FictionNarrationHistoireRécit
Book:La Vie ô combien ordinaire d'Hannah Green
Create image

“How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn't have any substance after all? Like when you've split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel. The problem is, they never do. "Plenty more fish in the sea," they'll say, or "You're better off without them," or "Do you want some of these potato chips?" They never really understand, because they haven't been there, every day, every hour. They don't know the way things have been, the way that it's made you, the way it has structured your world. They'll never realise that someone who makes you feel bad may be the person you need most in the world. They don't understand the history, the background, don't know the pillars of memory that hold you up. Ultimately, they don't know you well enough, and they never can. Everyone's alone in their world, because everybody's life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live. Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down.”

LoveLifeRealityOnly Forward
Book:Only Forward
Create image

“When a writer with a voice as good as Richard Christian Matheson's tells you something, you have no choice but to listen. In THE RITUAL OF ILLUSION the voices are legion, and the gaps between their testimonies drag us closer to understanding the darkly beating heart of all our, ephemeral, transfixing dreams. Dark, subtle, horrifically funny.”

HeartDreamChristianChoicesUnderstandingVoiceDarkIllusionSubtleGapsRitualDragTestimonyEphemeralLegion
Author:Michael Marshall Smith
Create image