Quotes from work
The Laundry Files

Charles Stross

The Laundry Files is a series of novels by Charles Stross. They mix the genres of Lovecraftian horror, spy thriller, science fiction, and workplace humour. Their main character for the first five novels is "Bob Howard" , a one-time I.T. consultant turned occult field agent. Howard is recruited to work for the Q-Division of SOE, otherwise known as "the Laundry", the British government agency which deals with occult threats. "Magic" is described as being a branch of applied computation , therefore computers and equations are just as useful, and perhaps more potent, than classic spellbooks, pentagrams, and sigils for the purpose of influencing ancient powers and opening gates to other dimensions. These occult struggles happen largely out of view of the public, as the Laundry seeks to keep the methods for contacting such powers under wraps. There are also elements of dry humour and satirisation of bureaucracy.

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“Never attribute to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by jet lag.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 7, “Communion” (p. 134)

Charles Stross photo

“Suppose rather than passing the plate in church, they get a radio show and pass the plate and half a million listeners donate. Isn’t that going to convince a preacher that it’s all true? Wealth comes to the faithful, that’s the message they’re going to take. An’ I never yet met a con man who wasn’t the better at the job for believing his own spiel.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

“That’s not…untrue. But money corrupts. Almost invariably, powers that arise around money are corrupted by it. He might have started out as a true believer, but money has a way of taking over. A church is a business, after all, and those employees or executives who are good at raising money are promoted by their fellows.”
Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 7, “Communion” (p. 126)

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“There’s a certain point beyond which any sufficiently extreme Calvinist sect becomes semiotically indistinguishable from the Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh. But even though their eschatology is insane, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they’re trying to summon up the elder gods.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 7, “Communion” (p. 126)

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“Pay no attention to the gill slits and fins, they’re signs of grace. It’s come to a pretty pass when the bastard spawn of the Deep Ones turn into Presbyterian fundamentalists, hasn’t it?”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 7, “Communion” (pp. 125-126)

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“What if he is a true believer, have you thought about that?”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

“A true believer in what? The prosperity gospel? New Republican Jesus who rewards his faithful flock for their faith with the ability to make money fast? That’s self-serving cant, and you know it. Wish-fulfillment as religion.” A twitch of the cheek: Persephone unamused. “Don’t get me started on the gap between the Vatican and their flock.”
Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 7, “Communion” (p. 125)

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“We’re living through the end times, but not in any Biblical sense—the religions of the book have got their eschatology laughably wrong.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 6, “Jet Lag” (p. 110)

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“Ninety-eight percent of management work in this organization is routine. The other two percent is a tightrope walk over an erupting volcano without a safety net. Congratulations: here’s your balance pole.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 5, “Bashful Incendiary” (p. 75)

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“Time is the one thing money can’t buy.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 3, “Big Tent” (p. 44)

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“Like I said: the only god I believe in is coming back. And when he arrives, I’ll be waiting with a shotgun.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Epilogue, “On the Beach” (p. 301)
The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010)

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“I’m not one hundred percent clear on the clinical definition of death, but I’m pretty sure that lying trapped in my own unbreathing body meets some of the requirements.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 16, “Eater of Souls” (p. 294)

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“If there’s one thing extreme god-botherers of every stripe have in common, it’s that they don’t have any sense of humor at all where their beliefs are concerned.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 12, “Countermeasures” (p. 211)

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“I generally try to avoid funerals: they make me angry. I know the purpose of a funeral is to provide comfort and a sense of closure for the bereaved; and I agree, in principle, that this is generally a good thing. But the default package usually comes with a priest, and when they start driveling on about how Uncle Fred (who died aged sixty-two of a hideous brain tumor) is safe in the ever-loving arms of Jesus, the effect it has on me is not to make me love my creator: it’s to wish I could punch him in the face repeatedly.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 8, “Club Zero” (pp. 133-134)

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“Cultists. They’re like cockroaches. We humans are incredibly fine-tuned by evolution for the task of spotting coincidences and causal connections. It’s a very useful talent that dates back to the bad old days on the savannah (when noticing that there were lion prints by the watering hole and then cousin Ugg went missing, and today there are more lion prints and nobody had gone missing yet, was the kind of thing that could save your skin). But once we developed advanced lion countermeasures like stone axes and language, it turned into our secret curse. Because, you see, when we spot coincidences we assume there’s an intentional actor behind them—and that’s how we create religions. Nature does weird stuff, so it must be governed by supernature. There’s lightning in the clouds: Zeus must be throwing his thunderbolts again. Everyone’s dying of plague except those weird folks with the strange god who wash every day: it must be evil sorcery. And so on.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 8, “Club Zero” (p. 128)

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“It’s like a steam locomotive or a stone axe: just because it’s obsolete doesn’t make it any less of an achievement, or any less fit for purpose.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 7, “Beer and Tea” (p. 111)

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“On the other hand, unreliability never stopped anyone from using a given technology—just look at Microsoft if you don’t believe me.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 5, “Lost in Committee” (p. 88)

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“The trouble is, you can ignore history—but history won’t necessarily ignore you.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 5, “Lost in Committee” (p. 87)

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“Our trains are not ambushed by dragons, suicide bombers, or chthonian tentacle monsters. Frankly, given the quality of the postprandial conversation, this is not a net positive.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 5, “Lost in Committee” (p. 77)

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“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 2, “Pointing the Finger” (p. 32)

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“Criminology, the study of crime and its causes, has a fundamental weak spot: it studies that proportion of the criminal population who are stupid or unlucky enough to get caught. The perfect criminal, should he or she exist, would be the one who is never apprehended—indeed, the one whose crimes may be huge but unnoticed, or indeed miscategorized as not crimes at all because they are so powerful they sway the law in their favor, or so clever they discover an immoral opportunity for criminal enterprise before the legislators notice it. Such forms of criminality may be indistinguishable, at a distance, from lawful business; the criminal a paragon of upper-class virtue, a face-man for Forbes.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Afterword, “The Golden Age of Spying” (pp. 388-389)
The Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue (2006)

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“The literary James Bond is a creation of prewar London club-land: upper-crust, snobbish, manipulative and cruel in his relationships with women, with a thinly veiled sadomasochistic streak and a coldly ruthless attitude to his opponents that verges on the psychopathic.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Afterword, “The Golden Age of Spying” (p. 385)
The Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue (2006)