Charles Stross: Trending quotes

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Charles Stross: 422 quotes3 likes

“And she actually looks—well, I’m not sure how to describe her. Scary is such an inadequate word, don’t you think?”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Annihilation Score (2015), Chapter 11, “Battle Without Honor or Humanity” (p. 197)

“If life hands your research department lemons and a recipe, you shouldn’t be surprised if they make lemonade for you. Or, better still, anti-lemonade countermeasures.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Annihilation Score (2015), Chapter 10, “Great Pay and Benefits! Apply Here!” (p. 184)

“Unfortunately his IQ seems to be off the scale, in the wrong direction.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Annihilation Score (2015), Chapter 10, “Great Pay and Benefits! Apply Here!” (p. 182)

“If pauses can be pregnant, this one’s on the run from a fertility clinic.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Annihilation Score (2015), Chapter 5, “The Office” (p. 89)

“Despair, dismay, disorientation, and delusion: the four horsemen of the bureaucratic apocalypse are coming my way.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Annihilation Score (2015), Chapter 5, “The Office” (p. 77)

“The home office hates vigilantes in Lycra fancy-dress outfits almost as much as they hate lawbreakers. You see, superheroes don’t follow the rules of evidence. They take procedural shortcuts, assault criminals, mess up crime scenes, and generally make it almost impossible to secure a conviction. Not to mention committing a basketload of offenses in their own right: aggravated trespass, assault, violating controlled airspace and flying without a license, breaking and entering, criminal damage...”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Annihilation Score (2015), Chapter 4, “Briefings” (p. 63)

“Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right now it has convinced Pete that it is harmless, but I know better: just give them thumbs and in no time at all they’ll have us working in the tuna mines, delivering cans from now until eternity.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 12, “Green Lime” (p. 240)

“Having a policy based on works of fiction is worse than having no policy at all.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 12, “Green Lime” (p. 229)

“But has it occurred to you that there might be a reason for that?”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

“I can think of several.” I cross my legs. “Mostly ranging from the inane to the criminally irresponsible.”
Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 11, “Boardrooms and Brokers” (p. 210)

“We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 11, “Boardrooms and Brokers” (p. 204)

“I promise not to hammer a stake through your heart or set you on fire, as long as you promise not to rip my throat out. Okay? We in the twenty-first century have this marvelous technical innovation; it’s called civilization, and it means we don’t have to make promises like that to everyone we meet because we can usually take it for granted.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 11, “Boardrooms and Brokers” (p. 203)

“Almost everything in the pop culture lexicon of vampirism is basically fiction—and fiction is the art of telling entertaining lies for money.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 9, “Committee Processes” (p. 159)

“Pete is clearly mildly perturbed by this, as so he should be: his faith doesn’t have much room for sanguinary magic, unless you count holy communion.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 3, “KGB.2.YA” (p. 54)

“One of the great besetting problems of the modern age is what to do with too much information.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 2, “Meet the Scrum” (p. 35)

“Vampires can’t exist. There’d be detailed records in the archives; they couldn’t possibly evade detection by the state for any significant period. Besides which…there’d be corpses everywhere. Human blood is a poor nutrient source; it’s about 60 percent plasma by volume and only provides about 900 calories per liter, so your hypothetical blood-sucking fiend is going to have to drink about two and a half liters per day. Those calories don’t come in the form of useful stuff like glucose and fat: it’s mostly protein from circulating red blood cells. Dracula would have to exsanguinate a victim every day just to stay alive, and would suffer from chronic ketoacidosis. The total number of intentional homicides for the whole country is around 700 a year; a single vampire would cause a 50 percent spike in the murder rate. Or they’d have to take transfusion-sized donations about two thousand times a year.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Rhesus Chart (2014), Chapter 1, “Prologue: One Month Ago” (p. 2; ellipsis represents elision of one sentence of description)

“I am at a loss for words to describe my lack of eagerness to go there.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 15, “Black Bag Job” (p. 321)

“Another problem with godheads, Johnny reflects, is that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. (He knows this because he started out as one, although he lost his faith before his balls dropped.) Consequently, they have immense difficulty in grasping, at an intuitive level, that someone who used to be one of them might no longer be completely in tune with their ideology.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 14, “Appointment in Samarra” (p. 291)

“The Other Place, the astral plane, the land of dreams—it’s not a real place like, say, Walsall. But it’s a metaphor for a mathematical abstraction, a manifold containing an n-dimensional space where everything is the product of geometrical transformations, including mass and energy and time. Leakage between dimensions occurs there: it’s how we summon demons from the vasty deep, communicate with aliens, and try to extract our tax codes from the Inland Revenue.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 14, “Appointment in Samarra” (p. 283)

“It is a government agency. And government agencies are run as bureaucracies. There is a role for bureaucracy; it’s very useful for certain tasks. In particular, it facilitates standardization and interchangeability. Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 13, “Fimbulwinter” (pp. 258-259)

“I tend to believe that the difference between us and them is that we don’t compromise our principles for temporary convenience.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 13, “Fimbulwinter” (p. 258)