“… and we have already seen how insurance is like a pyramid -(Huge, incomprehensible, hideously expensive, completely unnecessary and specifically designed only to be of benefit to you once you're dead?)”Tom Holt Djinn Rummy (1995)
“Treasure maps; Czarist bonds; a case of stuffed dodos; Scarlett O'Hara's birth certificate; two flattened and deformed silver bullet heads in an old matchbox; Baedeker's guide to Atlantis (seventeenth edition, 1902); the autograph score of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, with Das Ende written neatly at the foot of the last page; three boxes of moon rocks; a dumpy, heavy statuette of a bird covered in dull black paint, which reminded him of something but he couldn't remember what; a Norwich Union life policy in the name of Vlad Dracul; a cigar box full of oddly shaped teeth, with CAUTION: DO NOT DROP painted on the lid in hysterical capitals; five or six doll's-house-sized books with titles like Lilliput On $2 A Day; a small slab of green crystal that glowed when he opened the envelope; a thick bundle of love letters bound in blue ribbon, all signed Margaret Roberts; a left-luggage token from North Central railway terminus, Ruritania; Bartholomew's Road Atlas of Oz (one page, with a yellow line smack down the middle); a brown paper bag of solid gold jelly babies; several contracts for the sale and purchase of souls; a fat brown envelope inscribed To Be Opened On My Death: E. A. Presley, unopened; Oxford and Cambridge Board O-level papers in Elvish language and literature, 1969-85; a very old drum in a worm-eaten sea-chest marked F. Drake, Plymouth, in with a load of minute-books and annual accounts of the Winchester Round Table; half a dozen incredibly ugly portraits of major Hollywood film stars; Unicorn-Calling, For Pleasure & Profit by J. R. Hartley; a huge collection of betting slips, on races to be held in the year 2019; all water, as far as Paul was concerned, off a duck's {back]”Tom Holt The Portable Door (2003)
“Like, there's these new fundamentalist religious fanatics, some name like Meek Militant Action. Their aim's to inherit the Earth, provided nobody objects.”Tom Holt book Paint Your Dragonc. 12 Paint Your Dragon (1996)
“The knight raises both eyebrows, like someone by Burne-Jones who's just trodden on something sharp. 'I am Prince Boamund, eldest son of King -''Boamund?''That's right,' says the knight, 'Boamund, eldest son of -''How do you spell that?'Boamund looks worried. Where he comes from you can take advanced falconry, or you can take spelling; not both. Guess which one he opted for.”Tom Holt c. 1 Grailblazers (1994)