Alternate Reality Quotes

“Do you play?”

Quincy jerked her eyes away from the instrument to find Lord Arch watching her, his mouth drawn in a very familiar straight line.

“Only for myself, now that Ezekiel is dead,” she answered truthfully.

“How delightful,” he said, smiling, his handsome face giving way to the refined wrinkles of his age. “Why don’t you play for yourself now, and I’ll just listen?”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“The station was filling with more movement and noise and light, as the morning sun began to bounce and rattle off the brass and glass of the building. Quincy pushed through the crowd, her eyes towards the ground, her feet guiding her out of the station. She only lifted her head when she came out onto the sidewalk. And there, before her, a familiar figure was waiting, standing with a paper in one hand, watching the flow of traffic. He saw her and waved in silence, somehow knowing it wasn’t a morning for many words.

“Did Fisher tell you to come?” Quincy said, her voice sounding so unlike itself—sounding yearning.

“No,” Arch replied. Then he shook his head as confirmation, as if it were an important truth she needed to know two ways. “But I knew this was his train.”

“You missed him.”

“I didn’t come for him. I came for you.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“In my family Monahwee is known for his magic with horses. My Aunt Lois Harjo said he was gifted in the ability to travel on a horse. He could leave for a destination at the same time as everyone else, but arrive before anyone, a feat impossible in linear time.

The world doesn't always happen in a linear manner. Nature is much more creative than that, especially when it comes to time and the manipulation of time and space. Europe has gifted us with inventions, books and the intricate mechanics of imposing structures on the earth, but there are other means to knowledge and the structuring of knowledge that have no context in the European mind.

When the explorer Magellan traveled around the world by ship, he stopped at Tierra del Fuego. The indigenous people who resided there could not see the huge flags of his ships as they docked out in the natural harbor. They had not previously imagined such structures and could not see them. Conversely, neither could European explorers see the particular meaning of indigenous realities.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“Sounds like you're trying to say that creation of new alternate worlds is a conscious decision.'

'I'm not trying to say it - I just said it.”
― Neil Gaiman & Michael Reaves, InterWorld

“But love?” She made a face. “It’s an all-encompassing machine, with no parts but the weak human heart. You give everything to it with no promise of security in return.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“As they walked down the stairs to the wide sidewalk, Quincy said, “I never thought you for a churchgoer, Arch.”
“You forced me to it, St. Claire. Some demons drive a man to the bottle, some demons drive a man to the church.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“Quincy didn’t look away from Arch’s face, and she felt something burn in her chest, the same overwhelmingly fierce pride she had felt when looking at a perfectly inked Q sheet or an expansion report that exceeded even her high expectations.

“You will never lose your passion for truth,” Quincy promised.

Arch held his breath a moment, his eyes searching hers. “You say that so confidently.”

“You shake with it, Arch,” Quincy said, lifting a shoulder. “I suppose it’s one of your greater virtues.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“I bet the people living in the timeline where Hillary is president are laughing at us.

They’re probably sipping lattes and giggling: “Imagine if Trump had won! Can you even imagine what that clusterfuck would look like?”

But even in their wildest dreams they wouldn’t come up with the unimaginable clusterfuck that our timeline is.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Inside The Mind of an Introvert: Comics, Deep Thoughts and Quotable Quotes

“[M]isbelief is enormously engaging and even fun for those who become deeply involved in its cleverly constructed alternate worlds. People who work in the gaming industry have drawn striking parallels between the structure of a conspiracy theory such as QAnon and the structure of popular alternate-reality multiplayer games.”
― Dan Ariely, Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things

“But Quincy knew that her heart beat with the rhythm of the presses in the back room, that her blood ran black with ink, and that her mind filled with reams of numbers and projections and plans. The Q was Quincy's only vital organ.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“The music spread out of the f-shaped holes, spilling over the floor, easing and pulling, and Quincy gave herself to the personality of the sound. It was safe. It was straightforward.

The sound of the violin was all the humanity that Quincy could stand.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“Quincy ducked through a small alleyway between buildings and worked her confident way through the backstreets. The route was abundantly full of refuse bins, forgotten crates, and various laundry, hanging from back windows. Several cats, the local monarchy that Qunicy had long been acquainted with, were granting them passage while sitting atop the maze of half-broken fences. Quincy saluted a black female—the reigning queen—and passed through a slender passage between two buildings, leading them out onto Fair Street and its adjoining park in a manner of minutes.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“Forgetting Arch, forgetting tailors and backstreets and cats, Quincy lost herself in the magnificent architecture built to house even more magnificent machines. The train Quincy loved: its perfection of movement and speed and sound; its possibility and potential; its ability to efficiently transport the masses. It was here that Quincy always found the gears of her own mind worked loose, set back in place.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“If I owned a volume, I would beg you to print ten thousand copies on your presses and distribute them in the streets of every city in Europe.”

“You’d have to show me a way to make a profit from it first,” Quincy responded evenly.

“Arch tilted his head and raised an eyebrow, returning to his book as he answered, “I would build an argument so enticing and passionate you couldn’t deny me.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“Quincy made a disagreeable noise; she had never cared for months whose names sounded frivolous. April was the worst of the lot. February was a close second.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“By the time he returned to her small room, Quincy’s shock, like a typewriter, had come to the end of tis row, and her internal bell had rung. She was up, removing the blackened wallpaper to see what damage the wall had sustained.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“When they exited onto the street, Arch hailed a hansom, and Quincy slipped inside before he could offer her any more chivalry. There was just enough room in the carriage for two reasonably sized egos, and any tendency towards Lancelotism, Quincy told herself, was to be avoided.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“Like a spring pulled too tight, Quincy cocked her small chin up in the direction fo the voice.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“She froze. Several silent moments passed between them. More than one stranger walked around their still figures. She tried to speak, but Quincy was mortified from feeling at such a severe disadvantage, something she had not felt since she was a little girl on the streets, a little girl in the foundling factory, a little girl who had sworn that she would never feel this way again.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“Amazing how often the words fool and love go together,” Quincy drawled.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“After some time, Fisher said, “Per aspera ad astra.”

Quincy turned towards him. “What’s that?”

“Latin. It means to the stars through difficulties.”

By natural extension of the conversation, she looked up, viewing the faint points of light fighting down through a soft haze. “Does anyone make it, Fisher? To the stars?”

“I believe we have, Quince. We’ve seen the worst but known the best.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“She kept thinking that a time like this required words—one million lines of type, laid out perfectly, with no ink stains, no backward letters—to say what should be said. But that couldn’t happen, and she didn’t know what else to put in its place.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“Arch leaned back into his chair, but he was entertaining a smile. “There are few things more tedious than a friend who will not graciously receive.”

Quincy could have explained that nine years of poverty might have something to do with it, but instead she just replied, “You must find me maddening, then.”

Arch’s mouth twitched. “You, ma chérie, are something else entirely.”
― Beth Brower, The Q

“So is that a yes,' the sheriff asked.
Daniel held his breath. The lawsuit, the cost of bail, these were enough to push Clyde into the zone. The world stopped on Rita's next breath. A single assertion could end this mess--protective custody; the sheriff would shield Daniel from Clyde's wrath.
'No,' Rita said in a steady strong voice. 'My husband does not abuse us.'
The lie kicked Daniel as hard as Clyde's boot.”
― Edward Lazellari, Awakenings

“Apparitions are, so to speak, shreds and fragments of other worlds, the first beginnings of them. There is, of course, no reason why a healthy man should see them, because a healthy man is mainly a being of this earth, and therefore for completeness and order he must live only this earthly life. But as soon as he falls ill, as soon as the normal earthly state of the organism is disturbed, the possibility of another world begins to appear, and as the illness increases, so do the contacts with the other world, so that at the moment of a man's death he enters fully into that world.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Do you ever have the sense you’re living someone else’s life?”
― Sol Luckman, Cali the Destroyer

“It’s like that door you find one day,
way at the back of your closet.
And then you go into the closet
and turn the knob and open it.
And outside there it is:
the immense Caribbean.

And you can’t believe it.
You’ve lived here for so
long and you never knew
that all this was right here
the whole time.”
― Laurie Anderson

“Do you think it’s helped at all? I mean . . . with the not knowing?”
Leo considers the question, staring down at my half-eaten plate.
“In some ways, kind of? I mean, who even knows if my parents came from anywhere near where her family is, but . . . it’s nice to learn about anyway.”
There’s a beat, then, that I know isn’t the end of the thought, but the thought taking a new shape. I watch it in his face the same way I always have, wishing I could take it for granted. Wishing I knew if there would be a chance to watch it again.
“It’s weird to think . . . in some other life . . . Carla and I would be living there. Like there’s some alternate version of us who do. You know?”
― Emma Lord, You Have A Match

“Did I imagine her? No, I'm certain I saw her. A variation of myself with a sprightly step, determined to get somewhere, just up ahead.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts

“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there's another side to the coin, and you can't remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important -- creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.
-- Steve Jobs”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs