Trapdoor Quotes

“Corrigan crept up to the bar, cautiously moving around it. It looked like he was copying all the moves he’d seen in old cop movies and westerns, and doing it rather badly. He lowered the pistol. There was no one behind the bar. There was however, an open trapdoor. And that would mean the bounty hunter was - .“Don’t move!” Came Beck’s distant, slightly muffled, barked order. “My turn, I think!”

“This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.”

“Lake water, even when boiled, has an effect on my digestive system similar to the movement of a hangman’s trapdoor.”

“Because now that it's finally morning, the shadows are beginning to fade, the shadows that have been covering my mind and my soul. Now that they're gone, I can almost start to see the way, and it's different from the one they'd convinced me was all I could have.”

“But then life is never neat, it is made up of doors and trapdoors. You move down baroque corridors, and even when you think you know which door to open, you still need to have the courage to choose.”

“Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary. He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he drops through the trapdoor another puppet is in readiness to take his place.”

“The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned.”

“Wishing, like sipping a glass of punch, or pulling aside a bearskin rug in order to access a hidden trapdoor in the floor, is merely a quiet way to spend one's time before the candles are extinguished on one's birthday cake.”

“Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.”