The series
Quotes from The Train Between Worlds
The lines readers copy out. Each is given with its speaker and chapter, and a sentence of context where the line needs it.
“More than you think. And fewer than you'll need.”
“You'd want it to be like a tooth — you'd want to be able to put your tongue in the gap. It isn't. What's gone doesn't leave a gap. It leaves a smaller you, and the smaller you is quite comfortable and has no complaints.”
“The fare bought you a car. Nobody ever said the cars were fair.”
“It was not that she would lose her daughter. It was that she would choose, one door at a time, in what order.”
“If you can't feel it, it's already spent. Don't read them. You can't afford to know.”
“I'm quite sure I'm right to keep going. It's just that I couldn't tell you why any more. That's the only part that troubles me. The rest of it's quite all right.”
“She's not buying doors. She's paying somebody else's fare.”
“That's what this train does. It doesn't take from you. It gets you to give.”
“It doesn't fill in, Mrs Marsh. That's the thing nobody tells you. You build the rest of your life around the hole and the hole stays exactly the size it was.”
“The last one's the only one that was ever worth anything. The rest was just what I had in my pockets.”
“It's not nothing. People talk as though it's nothing.”
“A thing that cannot be interrogated can still be measured. I intend to measure it.”
“The fare is not memory. Everyone aboard believes the fare is memory. The fare is the person you would go back for, and the memories are only the form in which it is collected.”
“It isn't that it worked. It's that it was the only thing you had that was yours.”
“You get a shape, sometimes. Nothing in it. Just the shape of it. And you think, well, that was a good one.”
The most exact description in the series of what a spent memory feels like from the inside, from the man who has four hundred of them and nothing else.
“It's not for anything, love. I just carry it. I've carried it since I come aboard. It's the only thing I brought with me.”
“There is no version of this where you get everything, Mr Quist. There is only the question of what you'd rather have lost.”
“The ones that go are the ones that are about something. The ones that stay are the ones that are only the person.”
“You have not surveyed anything. You have drawn a very careful picture of an assumption.”
“Hers isn't a search any more, love. It's a habit with a hole where the reason was.”
“It's not for the feeling. It's for the being true afterwards.”
FAQ
Questions readers ask
What is the most quoted line from The Memory Fare?
The conductor's answer to how many memories a passenger has: More than you think. And fewer than you'll need. It is the rule of the whole series in nine words, and it comes back, in Cora's head, at the wall.
Where does the title The Forty-Year Passenger come from?
Verity Sloane boarded on 4 August 1981 and the book takes place in 2026, so she has been aboard forty-five years; passengers round. It is also the number of years since she last tested the two assumptions she made in her first eleven weeks.
Can I quote these on Goodreads or in a review?
Yes, with attribution to the book and Simran Mehta. Short quotations for review, discussion and commentary are welcome.
The line Abel says about the tea round, and the one Cora repeats back to him without knowing who he is. It becomes the spine of Book Three.