Adam Nevill Quotes

“Through their discomforts Dom and Phil were missing everything of interest: the sudden strip marshes, the faces in the rock formations, the perfect lakes, the awesome måskoskårså valley grooved into the earth during the Ice Age, the golden eagle circling above it, and the views of a landscape it was impossible to believe existed in Europe.”

“The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”

“I didn't wait to see her ship go off, because partings are stupid things and best got over quickly”

“Maybe we've been too silly to deserve a world like this.”

“[The] structural theory is of extreme simplicity. It assumes that the molecule is held together by links between one atom and the next: that every kind of atom can form a definite small number of such links: that these can be single, double or triple: that the groups may take up any position possible by rotation round the line of a single but not round that of a double link: finally that with all the elements of the first short period [of the periodic table], and with many others as well, the angles between the valencies are approximately those formed by joining the centre of a regular tetrahedron to its angular points. No assumption whatever is made as to the mechanism of the linkage. Through the whole development of organic chemistry this theory has always proved capable of providing a different structure for every different compound that can be isolated. Among the hundreds of thousands of known substances, there are never more isomeric forms than the theory permits.”

“If what they say is right we're none of us going to have time to do all that we planned to do. But we can keep on doing it as long as we can.”

“For Anne and our cub,for making me and my life less beastly”

“Some teeth long for ripping, gleaming wet from black dog gums. So you keep your eyes closed at the end. You don't want to see such a mouth up close. before the bite, before its oblivion in the goring of your soft parts, the speckled lips will curl back in a whinny of excitement. You just know it.”

“From the very core of each of them, their ancestors seemed to cry out in inarticulate voices. right then, they screamed in alarm from times before symbols and language could depict such things that hunted and meant murder.”

“He just existed before it and within the terrible presence that filled the cramped space of the attic.”