Scarlett Thomas Quotes
-
My novels are high concept. I guess big ideas interest me more than, say, the minutiae of domestic life.
-
I erased the thought from my mind, but I couldn't undo the fact that I'd had the thought in the first place.
-
It's not even a question of whether the universe is meaningful or meaningless. It's in what way could it be meaningful, or in what way, if it was meaningful, could that be even more meaningless than normal meaninglessness?
-
For other people, love is like some rare orchid that can only grow in one place under a certain set of conditions. For me it's like bindweed. It grows with no encouragement at all, under any conditions, and just strangles everything else.
-
I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.
-
But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.
-
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.
-
In some ways I'm a frustrated scientist or mathematician. The amount of times I've thought I'd go back to university and do theoretical physics because I like the big questions, but really I know now that that's not quite me. What's me is to do it in novels.
-
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.
-
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.
-
People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning.
-
Sometimes you have to trust grownups, perhaps more so when they are not there to actually supervise you.
-
One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it's wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it.
-
I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.
-
Living for ever would be like marrying yourself, with no possibility of a divorce.
-
Most people would look at an animal in a cage and instinctively feel that it should be set free. . . . It's a dangerous world out there, filled with predators. . . . What would you prefer? A comfortable, safe, warm, cosy life in a cage, or an uncertain life of freedom.
-
Homeopathy seemed . . . both mathematical and poetic.
-
I hate stereotypes and I hate cliche.
-
Honesty and authenticity are a big deal for me.
-
I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything.
-
Homeopaths argue that water has a memory.
-
You tell them what a happy ending consists of, which is always individual success. You tell them that nothing irrational exists in this world, which is a lie. You tell them that conflict only exists only to be neatly resolved, and that everyone who is poor wants to be rich, and everyone who is ill wants to get better, and everyone who gets involved in crime comes to a bad end, and that love should be pure. You tell them that despite all this they are special, that the world revolves around them.
-
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.
-
What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon.