Quotes from book
Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Name: Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer
Author: Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts

“She didn’t have to believe the technology existed. She only had to believe that people believed the technology existed. People, being stupid, believed all sorts of things.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 4, “The Mystery of the Champagne Supernovae” (p. 128).
Jack Glass (2012)

“Jack considered: there were worse things that could happen than him dying. Of course, there were much better things, too.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 1, “In the Box” (p. 75).
Jack Glass (2012)

“The motives that explained human murder bunched, historically, into three groups: material gain; personal grudge and sociopathy.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 4, “The Mystery of the Champagne Supernovae” (p. 124).
Jack Glass (2012)

“It could be any one of a dozen things. Experience has taught me that we much more often see connection where there is only random copresence. Pattern-seeking consciousness, you know. Great plains ape, you know.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 3, Chapter 8, “The Wrath of Diana” (p. 331).
Jack Glass (2012)

“She had expected to encounter death as a kind of existential depth and had been disappointed. But maybe there was a deeper truth there. Maybe profundity actually is a mode of disappointment. The rhythm of the climax—joy and despair, sex and pain—is of course the currency of life. Death can only ever be a sort of anticlimactic belatedness.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 3, “The Utility of Dreaming” (pp. 119-120).
Jack Glass (2012)

“What’s inside the box?
Doubt is there.
What’s another name for doubt?
Death is another name for doubt. Death is what inflects the immortal certainty of the universe’s process with uncertainty.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 1, “In the Box” (p. 90).
Jack Glass (2012)

“Nobody can overthrow the fascist dictator by being nicer than him. The reason for this is: by definition everybody is always already nicer than the fascist dictator.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 3, Chapter 8, “The Wrath of Diana” (p. 337).
Jack Glass (2012)

“Death is the currency of power.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 3, Chapter 8, “The Wrath of Diana” (p. 337).
Jack Glass (2012)

“She thought of the multitude.
Trillions of human beings, wrappend like a fog about their home star. The mind collapsed at the scale and the numbers. But if ethics meant anything at all, it meant not letting the largeness of the human population overwhelm our moral knowledge that life is lived individually, and that even when agglomerated into billions and trillions individual human beings deserve better han being used as tools. That the overwhelming majority of this vast mass of humanity was poor, living precariously and subsistence lives in leaky shanty bubbles, eating ghunk and drinking recycled water—this made this more, not less, true. These were the people least able to help themselves. Thery should be helped, not exploited.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 13, “Of Multitudes” (p. 239).
Jack Glass (2012)

“You’re just doing that to pass the time,” said Davide, dismissively.
“Just to pass the time,” agreed Jac. “Though I suppose time will pass, in any case, regardless of what I do.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 1, “In the Box” (p. 45).
Jack Glass (2012)

“Eva is perfectly content with her academic research,” said Diana. “She just isn’t interested in power. As I say those sentences,” she added, clasping her knees to her chest, “I can tell they’re both wrong. Aren’t they? Of course she’s interested in power.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

“She’s a human being,” agreed Iago.
Part 3, Chapter 8, “The Wrath of Diana” (p. 339).
Jack Glass (2012)

““It’s not right. A human being is a human being. A human being is not a toy.”
“We cannot help but use the people below us as a resource, my love,” said her two MOHmies, as one. “That is what it means to be in power. Your choice is to relinquish power forever, or to accept that and use people for good.”…
“If we are powerful,” sang her MOHmies, “we can make things better, but we are made unclean by the fact that we have power. If we are powerless we remain clean, but we cannot make things better.””

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 13, “Of Multitudes” (p. 240).
Jack Glass (2012)

“By all means let us consult your needs! So long as they overlap precisely with my needs, I’m sure we can accommodate them.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 3, Chapter 9, “Solving the Mystery” (p. 347).
Jack Glass (2012)

“I shouldn’t be naive” Diana said. “Of course, realising its destructive power only makes them want it more. Of course. Even more than great wealth, power craves technologies of destruction. Good to be wealthy, but better to remain in power—and the more awe-inspiring the weaponry at your disposal, the better able you are to do that.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 14, “The Third Letter of the Alphabet” (pp. 259-260).
Jack Glass (2012)

“It had to be one or the other. Did it have to be one or the other? Even the question as to whether it had to be one or the other had to be one or the other!”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 3, Chapter 7, “To Garland 400” (p. 328).
Jack Glass (2012)

“Individually speaking, death is always a rupture, a violence. But taking a total view, death is the bell curve upon which the cosmos is balanced. Without it, nothing would work, everything would collapse, clogged and stagnant. Death is flow. It is the necessary lubrication of universal motion. It is, in itself, neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 3, Chapter 8, “The Wrath of Diana” (p. 337).
Jack Glass (2012)

“As far as dreams were concerned—well dreams are generated by the random processes of neural oscillation during the brain’s rest phases. What dreams do is cycle and recycle images and feelings, rationalisations and fears. There’s nothing special about that. It’s not the dreams that matter (chaff, mental turbulence, the rotating metal bars moving endlessly through the transparent tub of metaphorical slushy). It is what the problem-solving circuits in the mind make of the dreams. Dreams iterate and test mental schemas, discarding the maladaptive to return the adaptive to the slush to be reworked. Dreams are emotional preparations for solving problems—that is why we have evolved them, because problem-solving abilities are highly adaptive and thus strongly evolutionarily selected. Dreams intoxicate the individual out of reliance on common sense and preconception, and tempt her into the orbit of private logic. Dreams have utility.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 3, “The Utility of Dreaming” (p. 119).
Jack Glass (2012)

“So it ends
As it begins.
Off we climb
And no one wins.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

From Thom Gunn, “Seesaw” quoted in Part 3, “The Impossible Gun” Epigram (p. 261).
Jack Glass (2012)

““Do you know what this is?
“The floor, Miss?”
“Dust! I read about it—tiny particles of matter.””

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 7, “The Investigation Begins” (p. 163).
Jack Glass (2012)

“His last hours alive. But he didn’t know!
None of us will know, of course. The weird grammar of death. You die, he or she dies, they die, but there is no genuine form for “I”. Not really. All know that, none know when.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, “The FTL Murders” Chapter 1, “The Mystery of the Hammered Handservant” (p. 101).
Jack Glass (2012)

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