Quotes from Bernard Beckett

For the one belief we all carry with us, no matter how rational we claim to be, is a belief in our own free will.

She remembered brighter days, but never spoke of them. It was one of the Great Mistakes, thinking of brightness as a quality of the past.

Talk is never just words.

In her mother's album the activists always looked so relaxed, certain the world would tumble at nothing more than a gentle nudge and the strum of a guitar. Maybe it was the way the sun was always shining in the photographs, or her mother's face, simultaneously eighteen and fifty at the centre of every frame, but it had all seemed so harmless.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved.

The successful Idea travels from mind to mind, claiming new territory, mutating as it goes.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear and superstition.

Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. It's very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover God's great plan.

The Idea enters the brain from the outside. It rearranges the furniture to make it more to its liking. It finds other Ideas already in residence, and picks fights or forms alliances. The alliances build new structures, to defend themselves against intruders.