Marcus Sedgwick Quotes

There's always a third choice in life. Even if you think you're stuck between two impossible choices, there's always a third way. You just have to look for it.

— Marcus Sedgwick

“A story has its purpose and its path. It must be told correctly for it to be understood.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“If a life can be ruined in a single moment, a moment of betrayal, or violence, or ill luck, then why can a life not also be saved, be worth living, be made, by just a few pure moments of perfection?”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“I'm just a girl in a nurse's uniform, but that doesn't mean I know how to save these men, and they- they are men in uniforms, but that doesn't mean they know how to die.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

If I were dead, I wouldn't be sad, and I wouldn't be glad, because I wouldn't be.

— Marcus Sedgwick

There never was a story that was happy through and through.

— Marcus Sedgwick

“He wonders if a few moments of utter and total joy can be worth a lifetime of struggle.
Maybe, he thinks. Maybe, if they're the right moments.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

And if I really can see the future, then what does it mean? Is there any sense in our lives if everything is already out there, just waiting to happen? For if that were so, then life would be a horrible monster indeed, with no chance of escape from fate, from destiny. It would be like reading a book, but reading it backwards, from the final chapter down to chapter one, so that the end is already known to you.

— Marcus Sedgwick

“Eric Seven does not believe in love at first sight.
He corrects himself.
Even in that moment, the moment that it happens, he fees his journalist's brain make a correction, rubbing out a long-held belief, writing a new one in its place.
He did not believe in love at first sight. He thinks he might do so now.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“I might have been normal but if I was I cannot remember that time.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“People think I have so much faith in myself, but I have none. I have no faith in myself, or in what I can do, and yet people think I can do anything I want.
That's how I seem, but it's an illusion. It's an act, nothing more.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“He had learned something already in the course of his journey. If you carried a closed wooden box, people want to know what is in it.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“It was like a new kind of vision, seeing with eyes as keen as scalpel blades, that cut away desires and emotions and wishful thinking and left only what was fact.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“Secondly, I continued my education in a more important way,
through the observation of everyone around me,
because nothing is more important to learn in life than
the interaction of a human being with another human being.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

Edward looks wistfully at Mat, and while the girls are pretty, Nancy particularly, it is Mat who thinks about the most, because he wished he'd been more like Mat when he was young.
If he'd been more like Mat, more confident, maybe he wouldn't have missed his chances in life, chances that sometimes only came along once. Sometimes there are single moments, he thinks, where your path divides, your life can go one way, so very different from another. Work out well, rather than be a failure. And if you miss those chances, he thinks, well, is that it?

— Marcus Sedgwick

“Eirikr lies on the table, staring into the night sky, staring at the uncountable stars that are shining brightly down on him.
What lives, he thinks, are lived by the men up there?
What do they do?
What do they believe?
What do they see?
Do they see me?
He wonder about them all, all the many lives that have been, and that will be, and wonders why they are not all the same, why they are what they are. It cannot be, he thinks, that when our life is run, we are done. There must be more to man than that, surely?
That we are not just one, but a multitude.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“Yes. You see, the whole nature, shape and even the modern blue pigment of the TARDIS is so deeply unfamiliar to the primitive mind that, although the optic nerve registers its presence, the brain cannot decode what it is seeing. The primitive visual cortex is unable to relay information about it consciously to the viewer. In effect, even though her chameleon circuit is still damaged, she's as good as invisible. She'll be just fine.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

You will never find it," his ghost says. "What?" "What you are looking for. You want to go back to the start. You want to go back to where you began. You want to find the happiness you once had. But you can never get there, because even if you somehow found it, you yourself would be different. You would have changed, from your journey alone, from the passing of time, if nothing else. You can never make it back to where you began, you can only ever climb another turn of the spiral stair. Forever.

— Marcus Sedgwick

“She risked her life to put your mind at rest,' Evgenia said. 'How great is love!”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“Maybe he knows noting. Maybe it's that he feels it all, but whatever is happening to him, he understands that he lived before. He lived other lives, in different times. And why not? It's something he has often wondered about, sitting on the train in the morning, looking from the corner of his eye at the other commuter, wondering why.
Why am I not living that person's live? That man, there, with the sharp suit and the slightly stupid tie? Or that scruffy guy with the headphones? Or that woman, a little pregnant?
Often, as he sat fiddling with OneDegree, he has wondered why this life is the one he's had, and not one of the thousands of contacts passing through his device, or one of the countless others that could have been his.
Now he knows. He has been others.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“The first thought was this: that he was a foolish old man, because all his life he'd been looking for something and it was only when Anna joined him in the bar that evening that he realized that home is not something you find outside yourself; home is something you carry inside you, and it's made from the memories of the people you love, and the people who have loved you.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“To be remembered in the heart of a loved one is to live forever”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“One final time I told myself I wasn't abducting my little brother.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

You have life written all over you. Some people bear tragedy on their faces; loss, death, whatever it might be. But you have life.

— Marcus Sedgwick

Slowly he had learned that there is a world beneath the visible one, and that people, some people at least, have a different life, that they carry inside them.

— Marcus Sedgwick

“Stories twist and turn and grow and meet and give birth to other stories. Here and there, one story touches another, and a familiar character, sometimes the hero, walks over the bridge from one story into another.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

They said something funny. They said, 'Even God leaves on the last boat from Nome.' What does that mean?

— Marcus Sedgwick

“Cold didn't worry him unduly. Given that his normal body temperature was way below human levels, the dip in the river had been no more than refreshing, certainly not deadly.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“One of the advantages of having a binary vascular system was that he could always pump his blood faster than normal if he chose to, raising his body temperature at will.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“You know they used to use nails," he says. "In the old days. Poor folks still do. Not the best idea, a nail in a coffin." Bowman says nothing, but in his mind, he asks, Coffin? The man nods, smiling. He picks up something now, and shows it to Bowman, for inspection. It is a long brass screw. "That's better," he says. "Better than a nail. Notice anything about it?" Bowman shakes his head. "The screw runs widdershins. Back to front. 'Gainst the clock. All the other screws in the world turn the other way to this one. But coffin screws are different. " Bowman forms a word in his mind. Why? The coffin maker smiles. "To stop them from coming back, of course.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“He'd watch the loading and unloading of boats; the building of houses, shacks, and huts; and above all, the people, each carrying a bundle of stories inside them.”

— Marcus Sedgwick

“If I can see the future, then what does that mean? It would be like knowing the end of a story right from the start, almost as if you were reading it backwards.
And who wants to know how their own story ends?”

— Marcus Sedgwick

Why were there some people who seemed so sure of themselves that it made him feel small and ignorant by comparison, as if they had a script to life with all the answers on it? He felt he didn't even know the questions.

— Marcus Sedgwick

And that was how the young writer found love, just when he had stopped looking for it.

— Marcus Sedgwick

Love, he decided, is not about how much someone else cares for you, it's about how much you care for someone else.

— Marcus Sedgwick