Quotes from book
The Gun Seller

The Gun Seller

The Gun Seller is the first novel by English actor, musician, comedian, and writer Hugh Laurie. It concerns former Scots Guards officer Thomas Lang and his reluctant involvement in a conspiracy involving international arms dealers, terrorists, the CIA, the MoD, beautiful women and fast motorcycles.

“The only good thing I've ever noticed about money, the only positive aspect of an otherwise pretty vulgar commodity, is that you can use it to buy things.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

Source: The Gun Seller

“O'Neal had uttered three words: 'Conspiracy to murder.'
The correct word for me to repeat in an incredulous tone of voice would have been 'murder'; a very small, and psychiatrically disturbed, section of the population might have opted for the 'to'; but the one word out of the three I most definitely should not have chosen to repeat was 'conspiracy.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

The Gun Seller (1996)

“It was a beautiful afternoon; one to make you realise that God really can be very good sometimes with weather and scenery.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

The Gun Seller (1996)

“Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

Source: The Gun Seller

“Death and disaster are at our shoulders every second of our lives, trying to get at us. Missing, a lot of the time. A lot of miles on the motorway without a front wheel blow-out. A lot of viruses that slither through our bodies without snagging. A lot of pianos that fall a minute after we've passed. Or a month, it makes no difference.
So unless were going to get down on our knees and give thanks every time disaster misses, it makes no sense to moan when it strikes.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

Source: The Gun Seller (1996)

“There’s an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you’re climbing into a metaphor.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

Source: The Gun Seller (1996)

“It was the sheer variety of the pain that stopped me from crying out. It came from so many places, spoke so many languages, wore so many dazzling varieties of ethnic costume, that for a full fifteen seconds I could only hang my jaw in amazement.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

Source: The Gun Seller

“Newton's Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement. To say that I'd turned the offer down raised the possibility that I might not have done.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

Source: The Gun Seller

“Love is a word. A sound. Its association with a particular feeling is arbitrary, unmeasurable, and ultimately meaningless”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

Source: The Gun Seller

“This was the tricky bit. The really tricky bit, trickiness cubed.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

Source: The Gun Seller (1996)

“It is the middle of December now, and we are about to travel to Switzerland - where we plan to ski a little, relax a little, and shoot a Dutch politician a little.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

Source: The Gun Seller (1996)

“Just because it's a bad job doesn't mean I need to do it badly.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

Source: The Gun Seller

“Having a vote once every four years is not the same thing as democracy.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

Source: The Gun Seller

“Dawn was definitely pulling into the station by now, and the snow had begun to throb with an electric, new-fallen whiteness. It climbed the inside of my trousers, and clung, squeakily, to the soles of my boots, and the bit just in front seemed to say ‘don’t walk on me, please don’t walk... oh.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

The Gun Seller (1996)

“We were walking through Hyde Park, going nowhere in particular, holding hands for a bit, then letting go as if holding hands wasn't one of life's big deals.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

The Gun Seller (1996)

“The first item was fighting under the name ‘Crostini of Mealed Tarroce, with Benatore Potatoes’ and weighed in at an impressive twelve pounds sixty-five. The Ralph Lauren blonde came over and asked me if I needed any help with the menu, and I asked her to explain what potatoes were. She didn’t laugh.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

The Gun Seller (1996)

“I found a cab eventually, and told the driver in fluent English that I wanted Wenceslas Square. This request, I now know, is phonically identical to the Czech phrase for ‘I am an air-brained tourist, please take everything I have’.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

The Gun Seller (1996)

“They said it was a sitting-room, but I don’t know why they’d decided to confine its purpose just to sitting. Obviously, sitting was one of the things you could do in a room this size; but you could also stage operas, hold cycling races, and have an absolutely cracking game of frisbee, all at the same time, without having to move any of the furniture.
It could rain in a room this big.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

The Gun Seller (1996)

“Inside there was a wall three feet away. And between the wall and the door, in this unbelievably tiny space, a girl in a lemon-coloured shirt sat at a desk, with word processor, potted plant, mug of pencils, furry gonk, and wadges of orange paper. It was incredible that anyone or anything could function in such a space. It was like suddenly discovering a family of otters in one of your shoes.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

The Gun Seller (1996)

“People talk about nightfall, or night falling, or dusk falling, and it's never seemed right to me. Perhaps they once meant befalling. As in night befalls. As in night happens. Perhaps they, whoever they were, thought of a falling sun. That might be it, except that that ought to give us dayfall. Day fell on Rupert the Bear. And we know, if we've ever read a book, that day doesn't fall or rise. It breaks. In books, day breaks, and night falls.
In life, night rises from the ground. The day hangs on for as long as it can, bright and eager, absolutely and positively the last guest to leave the party, while the ground darkens, oozing night around your ankles, swallowing for ever that dropped contact lens, making you miss that low catch in the gully on the last ball of the last over.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

The Gun Seller (1996)

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