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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f7909dc | First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life--oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness. | death | Charles Stross | |
| 55cc116 | Only debt is forever. | forever | Charles Stross | |
| 1731df2 | butcher, baker, fusion-reactor maker. | butcher | Charles Stross | |
| 200b511 | Private ownerships of a ...slave chip is illegal in many polities. It tends to be a government monopoly, much like other forms of violence. But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters. | slavery violence | Charles Stross | |
| 394a794 | Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!" "It's" | Charles Stross | ||
| 7213c6a | I try not to notice the exploded eyeballs or the ruptured tongue bursting through the blackened lips. This job is quite gross enough as it is without adding my own dry heaves to the mess. | Charles Stross | ||
| f4d972e | But, as Andy pointed out, if being a smart-arse was an offence, the Laundry would not exist in the first place. | Charles Stross | ||
| 81a5cfd | I set the self-portrait timer on the camera to ten seconds, handed it to the zombie, and sent him into the grid and through the door to blow himself up. Then things got weird. | Charles Stross | ||
| 2b0aca7 | WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES. In our youth, if we survive them, they're called learning experiences or teachable moments or some-such. And that which does not maim or kill us usually makes us stronger, albeit sometimes also sadder and more cynical. | Charles Stross | ||
| 15ad76d | Some people you just do not want to leave outside the tent pissing in, and in my early twenties, self-confident and naive, I was about as safe to leave lying around unsupervised as half a ton of sweating gelignite. | Charles Stross | ||
| f747ab2 | NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-.. | mind-uploading space terraforming | Charles Stross | |
| 83b91bf | Although I am unconvinced that I desire life, I am not yet ready to embrace death. | fate life living | Charles Stross | |
| 0c39a2b | She extends a fingertip. After a moment's hesitation, Manfred extends a fingertip of his own. They touch, exchanging vCards and instant-messaging handles. She stands and stalks from the breakfast room, and Manfred's breath catches at a flash of ankle through the slit in her skirt, which is long enough to comply with workplace sexual harassment codes back home. Her presence conjures up memories of her tethered passion, the red afterglow of a.. | Charles Stross | ||
| aedb560 | There will be plenty of backup and support, but she's still going to have to do heartbreaking things to people who probably don't understand why the pale woman with the bone-white violin and blood dripping from her fingertips is coming for them. | Charles Stross | ||
| b649b3f | 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 | ||
| 4b6e7b9 | After a couple of years of death by bureaucratic snu-snu (too many committee meetings, too many tedious IT admin jobs) | Charles Stross | ||
| 66a70c4 | I shove my reading matter back into my messenger bag (it's a novel about a private magician for hire in Chicago--your taxpayer pounds at work) and go to stand in the doorway. | Charles Stross | ||
| 1b5e0e3 | Someday I'll write a textbook about personality profiling through possessions; but for now let's just say this example is screaming "megalomaniac!" at me." | Charles Stross | ||
| 400d789 | Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else. | Charles Stross | ||
| 2f11cbf | Some people can mess up anything, and computational demonology adds a new and unwelcome meaning to terms like "memory leak" and "debugger." | Charles Stross | ||
| 8931a31 | Waaant equity," hisses the alien intruder. "You can't be Pamela Macx," says Pierre, his back to the wall, keeping the sword point before the lobster-woman-thing. "She's in a nunnery in Armenia or something. You pulled that out of Glashwiecz's memories - he worked for her, didn't he?" Claws go snicker-snack before his face. "Investment partnership!" screeches the harridan. "Seat on the board! Eat brains for breakfast!" It lurches sideways, t.. | economy zero-sum-game | Charles Stross | |
| ab238fb | I don't mind going without clothes, but being without a microprocessor is truly stripping down. It's like asking a sorcerer to surrender his magic wand, or a politician to forswear his lies. | Charles Stross | ||
| e6666a2 | This has serveral consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms--translation: all your bank account are belong to us-- | science-fiction | Charles Stross | |
| 8e1d0a0 | Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. | Charles Stross | ||
| e74d0f7 | the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so. | Charles Stross | ||
| f5c4e74 | There are good ways and bad ways to get my attention. Whacking on my ego with a crowbar will get my attention, sure, but it's not going to leave me well disposed to the messenger. | delivery ego getting-attention messenger | Charles Stross | |
| 464805e | He monologued at me. With PowerPoint. He what? And you're still sane? Obviously I underestimated you. | Charles Stross | ||
| 916b09e | the ads made me feel bilious and love-stricken, invaded and debauched by a coldly mechanical lust for whatever fetish the desire machines were pushing at their victims at any given instant. | Charles Stross | ||
| aa357dd | Jest upalny letni wtorek. Stoi na placu przed dworcem Centraal, ma wlaczone galki oczne. Kanal skrzy sie sloncem, wokol smigaja skutery i rowerzysci-kamikadze, ze wszystkich stron trajkoca turysci. Plac pachnie woda, ziemia, rozgrzanym metalem i spalinami z zimnych katalizatorow, jak pierdnieciem; w tle podzwaniaja tramwaje, nad glowa fruwaja ptaki. | Charles Stross | ||
| 8a774b1 | corruption is defined in narrow terms to nail the poor deluded fool who slips a PS20 note inside the cover of their passport before handing it to the Border Force officer who is checking travel documents with a CCTV camera looking over her shoulder. There's nothing corrupt about the government minister who announces new and impossible performance targets for a hitherto just-about-coping agency that manages transport infrastructure, drives i.. | Charles Stross | ||
| 19cda66 | The glass isn't half-empty or half-full. What you're looking at is half a pint of depreciable assets sitting in a pint of capital infrastructure that can be amortized over two accounting periods." ... "Is there an engineering one?" ... "Yes! It's quite simple: That's half a pint, all that's wrong is the glass is twice as big as it needs to be." | Charles Stross | ||
| f372451 | I can get you a cheaper ticket if you let me amputate your legs: I can even take your thighs as a deposit," said the travel agent. He was clearly trying hard to be helpful: "It's not as if you'll need them where you're going, is it?" "Is it possible to find a better price by booking me on a different routing?" I asked. "I'm very attached to my limbs." (Quaint and old-fashioned, that's me.)" | Charles Stross | ||
| 237bb65 | There's a faint popping noise, and the entire wall of the incident room shifts to the colour of the night sky above a Japanese city. | Charles Stross | ||
| 84d9db9 | money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything. | Charles Stross | ||
| 25e4a19 | You win some, you lose some. And when you lose, you have to pull yourself together and go back for more. Otherwise, the other side wins by default. | Charles Stross | ||
| 7b33ae4 | Immediately he became convinced that all the cupboards in the house were full of pineapples. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 98864ba | The sky spoke to me," said Childermass. "If what I saw was true, then ..." He paused. "Then what?" asked Mr Norrell. In his weakened state Childermass had been thinking aloud. He had meant to say that if what he had seen was true, then everything that Strange and Norrell had ever done was child's-play and magic was a much stranger and more terrifying thing than any of them had thought of. Strange and Norrell had been merely throwing paper.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 576dddd | I am a Book," said Vinculus, stopping in mid-caper. "I am the Book. It is the task of the Book to bear the words. Which I do. It is the task of the Reader to know what they say." | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 0cc9bb9 | And now, Your Majesty," said Strange, "I think it is time we returned to the Castle. You and I, Your Majesty, are a British King and a British magician. Though Great Britain may desert us, we have no right to desert Great Britain. She may have need of us yet." | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 09eeaa4 | In the moonlight David saw that Thoresby had become very peculiar indeed. Figs nestled among the leaves of beech-trees. Elder-trees were bowed down with pomegranates. Ivy was almost torn from walls by the weight of ripe blackberries growing upon it. Anything which had ever possessed any sort of life had sprung fruitfulness. Ancient, dried up frames had become swollen with sap and we putting out twigs, leaves, blossoms and fruit. Door-frames.. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 46ac5d2 | Because, whenever I am melancholy you talk to me of cheerful things and cure my low spirits and so I must now do the same for you. That is what friendship is. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 3028535 | Strange," said Henry Woodhope, "where did you get this nonsense?" "From the man under the hedge. Henry, you do not listen." "And he seemed honest, did he?" "Honest? No, not particularly. He seemed, I would say, cold. Yes, 'cold' is a good word to describe him and 'hungry' another." | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 9c3a328 | a tragi-comedy, telling of an impoverished minister's desperate attempts to gain money by any means, beginning with a mercenary marriage and ending with sorcery. I should think it might be received very well. I believe I shall call it, ' Tis Pity She's a Corpse. | Susanna Clarke | ||
| 9d0ee89 | He knew that there was a world of difference between these two notions: one was sane and the other was not, but he could not for the life of him remember which was which. | Susanna Clarke |