The Watchmaker of Filigree Street Quotes

“Your science can save a man’s life, but imagination makes it worth living.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said 'do not walk on the grass', one hopped. Anybody who didn't had failed to understand what Oxford was.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Thaniel listened for a while longer, because the silence was so deep and clear that he could hear ghosts of the thirty-six of thirty-seven possible worlds in which Grace had not won at the roulette, and not stepped backward into him. He wished then that he could go back and that the ball had landed on another number. He would be none the wiser and he would be staying at Filigree Street, probably for years, still happy, and he wouldn't have stolen those years from a lonely man who was too decent to mention that they were missing.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Loyalty is a continuous phenomenon, you don't score points for past action,”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Being solitary isn't a disease that needs a cure.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“The clockwork octopus came out. It extended a tentacle with a clicking of metal joints. Around it was looped the chain of his watch. He hesitated, but took it. The chain skittered over the metal tentacle with a high, thin pitch like incoming sea. It was quite a coincidence for a mechanical sea creature and he was speculating whether it could possibly have been done on purpose when Katsu stole his other sock and flopped on to the floor with an unbiological bang, whereupon it octopused out of the open door and slid down the banister. He exclaimed at it, was ignored, and then went after it just in time to see it disappear into the parlour. It was climbing up the leg of the piano stool when he caught up. The watchmaker confiscated the sock and threw it over his shoulder to Thaniel, who caught it with the tips of his fingers. The octopus settled in his lap. ‘Thank you for finding him,’ he said. Against the piano keys, his hands were too warmly coloured for the watery morning. ‘I was looking for him earlier. He plays hide and seek.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Science had to have some mystery otherwise everyone would find out how simple it was.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“It is not summer, England doesn't have summer, it has continuous autumn with a fortnight's variation here and there.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“. . . More octo . . .pi?' Thaniel said, knowing that it sounded wrong, though so did puses and podes. He tried to think where he had heard it last , but he did not often have business with more than one octopus at a time.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Englishmen were rained on too often to come up with anything that imaginative.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“I'm a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don't.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Think of horse races. People like to bet on the one with three legs and a wheeze.They don't bet on that one because they think it will win, but because they can see how very glorious it would be if it were to win”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“good number of people listened to, and wrote, music because they liked to hear the sound of mathematics.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“It was embarrassing to be associated with a man who thought Newton was a town.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“When a sign says don’t walk on the grass, one hops.’ He”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“They were philosophers; they put two and two together and got a goldfish.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Under the gas lamps, mist pawed at the windows of the closed shops, which became steadily shabbier nearer home. It was such a smooth ruination that he could have been walking forward through time, watching the same buildings age five years with every step, all still as a museum”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Mori smiled properly. The lines around his eyes were deeper than usual now. They made him look like an old photograph of a young man, often crushed, but ironed carefully so that only the ghosts of the marks remained.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“William had played [rugby] at Eton when it first became popular, and now he only spoke of it in a reverent tone he normally saved only for women and rifles. . . . .
[in contrast] Cricket had rules: one was not allowed to stamp on the head of another player and pass it off as enthusiasm.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Nobody wants a house in Osaka,' he said, and it was strange to hear him switch suddenly to foreign pronunciation in the middle of his English. 'It would mean you had to live in Osaka.'

'What's wrong with it?'

'It's like . . . Birmingham.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“He was not poor - he could afford ten candles & two baths a week. He wasn't going to throw himself in the Thames for the misery of it all and God knew most of London was worse off. All the same, he had a feeling life should not have been about ten candles and two baths a week.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“The safest way to success is to write according to the capacity of the stupidest member of the audience.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“In Japan, first names are only for who you're married to, or if you're being rude,' the watchmaker explained.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“I'll give you a cake if you get him in the stream by the end of the afternoon,' Mori said to Six.

'Hold on,' Thaniel said. 'No making criminals of the orphans, Fagin.'

'But I want some cake,' Six frowned. 'And his name isn't Fagin.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.

'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“When they returned to Filigree Street, Mori refused even to go upstairs. Instead he hid under a quilt in the parlour with Thaniel's never-read copy of Anna Karenina. The Russians, he said, knew how to write genuinely boring novels, and he would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough. They were all the more boring because he could remember reading the end in the recent future.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“How old are you, twenty-five? People don’t usually stick where they are at twenty-five for the rest of their lives.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Tallis with no pedal, Handel with, even the horrible organ piece that had been written for someone with three hands. He had thought it had all gone, but all he had done was lock himself up in a few little rooms and assume the rest of the house had fallen down. It hadn't. There were doors and doors, and dust, but when the curtains opened and the drapes came off, it was all where he had left it and hardly faded. He took his hands from the keys and sat with them in his lap instead, because his thoughts were echoing in the new space.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Throughout winter, she always believed that she was a summery sort of person. Unfortunately, this was not true, and after a week of good weather, she was sick of being too hot.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Are you going to enlighten me about London now? What's there? What's so damn important?" "A friend, like I said." "There isn't." "He hasn't met me yet.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street