Real Tigers (Slough House, #3)

by Mick Herron

The only reason for the absence of a sign requiring entrants to abandon all hope is that, as every office worker knows, it’s not the hope that kills you. It’s knowing it’s the hope that kills you that kills you.

All our problems would melt away if we could sit peacefully in a room. Catherine had heard that somewhere, probably at an AA meeting. Fractured pieces of wisdom, cobbled together from half-remembered axioms: put them together, and you had what passed for a philosophy, in the twilight world of the drunkard. And sober drunks could be just as dull as the real kind. Something else she’d learned at meetings.

The sober world, on the other hand, remained bleached of colour.

That a delicacy for the pampered was acquired through brutality was hardly news. By any civilised standard, it was how luxury ought to be measured—wealth meant nothing if it didn’t create suffering. Because the standard liberal whine that the rich were cushioned from life’s harsh realities was laughable ignorance: the rich created those realities, and made sure they kept on happening. That was what kitchens were for, along with prisons, factories and public transport.