Angelmaker

by Nick Harkaway

a consequence of the strange upheavals of the twentieth century, which made rural motherhood look, at least for a while, like an admission of defeat.

an adversarial relationship with an entity possessing the same approximate reasoning and emotional alertness as a milk bottle.

There will be a memorial service on Friday; guests are requested to bring no firearms or stolen goods.

“My clothing reminds me that the face of God is turned away from us. From the world. It is worn by members of the Order of John the Maker, who are called Ruskinites.

Ghost architecture, hanging on when the reason for it is past.

The thing I must do now … it will uproot so many old and rotted trees, and there are men who have made their houses in them. There are men cut from their wood.

There was no progress. No stability. There was just the question of whether things happened far enough away.

A gift of science to a world of horrors.

“A help meet for him.” As in a person suitable to share his life.

It’s not that it can’t be done, just that the odds of finding one person to share your days are bad enough, without looking for two who can also share their lives with each other and remain content with the situation whatever perturbations may arise along life’s curious road.

Joshua Joseph has no great hatred of modern technology—he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine.

Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system.

A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which use humans to make more clutter;

If a normal piece of clockwork is a person, this thing is a great city.

He’s got what they call the Quiet on him, don’t fret much and don’t give out at all if he does.

the truth is, he’s got the Screaming,

Vaughn Parry looks at us, and he sees corpses walking. He didn’t flinch in there because he’s always seeing dead men shudder. It’s how he lives. He was born dead himself, and that’s what the Screaming is. It’s a body walking without a heart to feel for anyone else.

Crooks do not go looking in distant corners for virtue. They can find that anywhere. Kindred wickedness, on the other hand, is a thing which must be sought out, and the seeking is the more difficult because it naturally masquerades, where virtue is drably ostentatious.

Edie Banister: code-wife, secret engineer, plucking strange truths from the white-hot iron of progress to fight the advance of terror across Europe’s fields.

The Sekunis have an unconventional approach to issues of marital fidelity owed to their conviction that more familiar understandings of love are the province of patriarchal totalitarianism.

The game is fixed. Always has been, always will be, and the only way out for a man is the gangster’s road. Take what you can, do what you must, and know that being a right sort never saved anyone from anything.

And that’s the other rule of the monte: if you can’t spot the sucker in the room, it’s you.

there is no question that we are in the shit. We are in the savage jungle. For some reason, which I do not yet apprehend, there are titans stirring in the deeps and shadows on the stairwell.

You seem to have fallen into a well-educated personal crisis.”

It is a toe which knows the world, which has done the wicked, secret things other toes only fantasise about.

She smiles again, and this time it starts at the very middle of her mouth and spreads like ripples in a pool all the way to the corners and across her face, until she has dimples on both cheeks and a glint in her eye which is unmistakably mischievious.

I propose to have sex with you. I believe it will be excellent sex. Your obedience on one particular issue of timing will be required to make it unforgettable sex. I will explain that issue as we go. At the moment, I wish to hear your inevitable objection to the general sex part of this plan.”

you do not in fact believe that we should not have sex right now, you simply believe that some people believe that you ought to believe it and although they are not here you do not wish to offend them. I say they can find their own damn entertainment.

parroted with such precision the cries of the men around him and the tactical theories he had committed to memory regarding the game,

When we do it, however, we will do it according to the Polly rules, not the Joe rules, because my rules are sophisticated and practical and yours are very strange and confused.

“Truth may reasonably be understood as the consonance of our impression of the universe with the underlying reality.

the human mind is a wave. It is formed around the brain. A very complicated pattern generated by a moderately complicated thing according to fairly simple rules. Your brain is a special sort of stone. The stream runs over the stone, the surface ripples, yes? We call it a standing wave. So, your mind is the ripple. Life is the motion of water through the pattern. Death is the pattern disappearing when the stone is moved or ground away.

That time was gone. After the war, there was no room for craft. If it couldn’t be machine made, mass-produced, almost no one could afford it.

There’s nothing so impressive as someone everyone wants to be with, who says he only wants to be with you.

The purpose of the Institute is to preserve lines of research science and technology which are presently unfashionable.

people are too stupid to know the simple truth when they hear it, and believe the most outrageous lies.”

how to do a flat bolt: how to drop everything and leave a country without stopping at your bank or getting a change of clothes; how to find someone who would supply you with a passport; how to vanish from view in a city and in the countryside.

Cheating is much better than skill. Great skill improves your chances. Great cheating guarantees victory, which is why it is called cheating. And some people are so horrified by it that it is an advantage in itself.

This was not an affair. It was another life. There was no sex. This was so much worse.

any item which can remain functional for forty years by the seaside, which is made furthermore of gold, and which is purportedly an engine of revolutionary change constructed on the principles of arcane mathematics, ought to be immune to lint.

a natural understanding that what he is doing now is rash, and stemming from that, the certain knowledge that it must be done well, or not at all.

whatever is happening between them is also not to be underestimated. They have found in each other some kind of jigsaw-puzzle match, a mutual knowing which goes beyond the smell of her still on his skin, and which he is at pains not to define or recognise until it has time to settle into him.

when your back was to the wall and someone else had the knife, there was, in the end, a simple decision: They are not the monster. I am.

he did exactly what society said he should and society was a cheat.

A law-abiding fellow, is Joe. He never considered that the law might not abide by him.

She’s being careful. It’s nice when someone who cares about you is careful. It means that they care.

Story of my life. Don’t make a fuss. You don’t want to be noticed. Pay on time, work to order, play by the rules. Don’t misbehave. Do as you’re told, and you’ll be all right. Except I did, and I’m not.

we should have more honest villains in this world!”

business deals not entirely honest, controversial decisions involving the treatment of indigenous peoples or the environment, or choices about cutting costs by risking customer welfare, and these, instead of being decently discarded as worthless or used in perfectly respectable blackmail, the cheeky bastard takes pains to return through the good offices of national newspapers and quite inappropriate websites, who naturally peruse them in the course of handing them over and make trouble.