Vicious Circle Quotes

“That's what I've never been able to get about religion: that charmless combination of altruism and insanity. Give me a cynical, self-interested bastard any day of the week; at least you can play chicken with him and know he'll stick to the rules.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“Words are the birds that break cover and show your enemy where you're hiding.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“And send not to ask for whom the fucking bell tolls, because you're not going to like the answer.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“Dead, blank, empty air surrounded me, like the moment after the fridge stops humming and you think the silence is a new sound.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“At least the smoke would give me a little cover; it was also choking me, making my eyes water and my lungs ache and spasm with each breath, but you can't have everything.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“I was tied to this place by the loose elastic of ancient guilt, and every so often the pull became too insistent to ignore.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“In which neighborhood?" I asked.

"The neighborhood of Mapstack-the Met's internal version of the Interpol's big data exchange system. It's usually worth a look, just for laughs. These people have no idea how the world works-how the little details connect up. They try to draw links between crimes, but they only work in straight lines so they miss it. They miss everything but fucking methodology. Like the real criminals-I mean, the ones who are so big you never even see them-can't vary their repertoire.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“Someone didn't close the circle,” the werewolf Zucker had said, charmingly mixing his metaphors, "and a little bird flew the nest." Still sounded like garbage whichever way you played it, but I was suddenly certain that the little bird was Abbie Torrington. Whatever she'd run from, it had to be bad if even being dead didn't get you free.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“I had to slow down once we got out onto the street. It was dark, so if we stayed away from the streetlights nobody would be likely to see our various wounds and blemishes, but the way we were staggering would draw attention anywhere. I pulled Juliet close to me and tried to pretend that we were lovers drunk on our own hormones-and, yeah, before you ask, that was an easy part to play. Every inch where our bodies touched was an inch I was painfully, achingly aware of.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“Without breaking stride she walked into the midst of the rioters, a cat among unbalanced pigeons”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“His knowledge of knives was more or less limited to which end you use to cut your cigar”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“His knowledge of nice was more or less limited to which end you use to cut your cigar”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“It was at this point that Po reentered the conversation. "Let me eat one of his eyes," he suggested.

Zucker ignored this suggestion. "You think it might be possible to squeeze some advantage out of the situation," he said. "Your sort always do. I can promise you, Castor, there's no profit here for anyone. Just death, and then after that the things that are worse than death."

"You're going to kill me and then rape me?”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“I grabbed hold of the altar rail to keep from falling, and then I couldn't seem to let go of it. It was so cold-the cold going right through me, taking my strength away. You know you see skaters on an ice rink, clinging to the side because they're scared to move out onto the ice? That's what I must have looked like. I just leaned against the rail, with my head spinning, and people screaming and running all
around me.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“No summoning is going to work if the ghost doesn't hear it, and I'd never done this before for a ghost who wasn't right there in the same space as me. But the rules are different in all sorts of ways once you're dead. What's space? What's distance?”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“Steve said he was a solicitor for a family firm in Stoke Newington- not quite a partner, but almost there. Melanie was a barrister, which was how they'd met. They'd been married for eighteen years. This pal- try small talk was as stiff and awkward as if I'd been asking them where and how they contracted syphilis.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“You were there?" Paul asked, sounding-to put it politely a little skeptical. It's not just cops: everyone draws their lines in the sand, sooner or later, and once they're drawn it takes a lot to shift them.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“. Either MacKay was making up for his earlier lapse of professional sangfroid, or he was just very slow on the uptake: either way, he was so mind-meltingly leisurely and methodical in his questioning that bludgeoning him to death with his own notebook would probably have counted as justifiable homicide. He wrote slowly, too, requiring several repetitions of all but the shortest sentences. Overall, I reckon he had the right stuff to be an officer.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“A burning church full of dead men in black gowns. Another one, in red, lying dead outside. And you, kneeling next to a woman who's been tied up with duct tape."

"I admit that looks fairly suspicious at first glance," I said.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“Suburban transcendence for the Ikea age.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“The stairwell smelled of piss and stale beer—two stages in a conjugation that usually ends with “dead-drunk guy facedown in his own vomit.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“No doubt about it, I was a mess. I needed to go and lie down in a darkened room until my body decided to let me off the hook for the abuse I’d subjected it to over the past couple of days.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“The only consolation was that - to the religious mind - adversity is good for the soul.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“It was a beautiful day. About time. Way past time. But if the sunlight knew what the fuck it was shining on, would it bother to make the trip?”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“Soy ateo [...] sobre todo porque no puedo soportar la contradicción de que a un Dios omnipotente se le ocurriera montar un mundo tan mal hecho como este.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“Y la verdad es, chico, que no vas a hacer nada. Al menos ahora. Hacer cosas es un lujo que sólo se permiten los vivos. Los muertos... bueno, más que nada, miran.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“But Susan didn’t have a yellow pages, so she’d gone online instead, and Juliet’s Web site had been the first to come up. I wasn’t surprised. It was sometimes the first to come up when your search string was “Chinese restaurants” or “plumbers.” I was pretty sure she’d done something to Google that was both illegal and supernatural.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle