My week in words: Cloud Atlas

Source: celebquotes.com

I believe in the providential roles of books. Cloud Atlas came my way only when I was ready for it. I started reading it a few times before and abandoned it every time, only to pick it up again. But not sooner than when I was prepared, I actually started reading this book, which talks about souls and reincarnation without being prescriptive. Only now I find myself open to the idea of eternal souls (souls passing through time like clouds in the sky), of people being bound to eachother, 'birthing' through their crimes and acts of kindness, their future.

My fascination with this book is too intense to put into words, and yet I have grown as a reader to the extent that I am actually enjoying it slowly. I'm not gulping it down like I did with others in the past, I'm reading it with the respect one should give to the savouring of caviar. I won't even start talking about the many literary merits of this extraordinary book, and just share a few quotes, whose strenght and relevance might ensure that they will forever live in my memory. 


“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.” 

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”  

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” 

“Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”  

“I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And i'll be waiting for you there.” 

“You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.”  

“All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.” 

“We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing.”

“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”  

“...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.” 

“Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true.”  

“If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.” 

“The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts.”  

“As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.” 


In an essay for Random House, David Mitchell, the author of 'Cloud Atlas', wrote:

"I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but until I came to Japan to live in 1994 I was too easily distracted to do much about it. I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but would I have become the same writer if I'd spent the last 6 years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself."