The Devil You Know Quotes

“I took a strong dislike to him right then to save time and effort later.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“It wasn't what I was expecting, but like I've always said: if life gives you lemmings, jump off a cliff.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“Even at its worst, there are tiny holes in the midnight canopy of my bad luck.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“My mum’s getting married,” said Cheryl. “Again. At the Brompton Oratory. Fourth time around the track, this is. They don’t say ‘Till death us do part’ for my mum; they say ‘Who’s holding ticket number twenty-three?”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“The key fob played the first bar of Für Elise as I locked the car up. I hoped that Beethoven's ghost was out there somewhere, making the night hideous for the managing director of Ford's.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“All in all, I was feeling the smug satisfaction of a job well begun and therefore half done.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“I was feeling as though my eyeballs had been scooped out, roughly polished with a sanding wheel, and then shoved back more or less into their right places. My head was full of gray cheese instead of brains.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“let him who keeps regular office hours cast the first stone.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“They weren’t random; nothing with a human mind as the operating system ever can be. But they were random enough.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“It wasn’t what I was expecting, but like I’ve always said, if life gives you lemmings, jump off a cliff.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“Fortune favors the pure of heart and the brassy of bollock.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“You move on. You move back. On because you're always getting older, back because there's always a set of habits and routines to catch you and suck you back in when your guard is down.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“And for Peter... well, sometimes cruelty is kindness in disguise. Sometimes pain is the best teacher. Sometimes it does you no harm to realize that there's a limit to what you can get away with.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“I could dodge the kick, but the stable door was already down - and I hadn't even realised it until I saw the splinters.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“to me it was looking like one of those logic problems that end up with the proposition that all men are Socrates, and Socrates is a rubber chicken.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“We have thirty people on staff, including several part-timers, and I believe everyone has seen her at least once. It was very frightening at first. As I said, she tended to favor the end of the afternoon, and at this time of year, it’s often dark by four. It was very disconcerting to be looking for a book in the stacks and then to look up and see her standing at the end of the aisle. Staring at you. With her feet a few inches above the floor or her ankles sinking into it.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“The doorbell made a severe, functional buzzing sound like a dentist’s drill sliding off recalcitrant enamel.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“My hand was a balloon sculpture, nerveless and fragile; it wouldn’t do what it was told.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“a good stare communicates itself by means other than sight.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“a pause so heavy it wasn’t just pregnant but ready to break its waters and deliver.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“William Blake is dreaming of Jerusalem under that sod, and Daniel Defoe is probably dreaming about something a fair bit earthier. You’ve also got John Owen and Isaac Watts, the reservoir dogs of eighteenth-century theology. What can I tell you? I just feel at ease in their company.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“It was full of the usual strata of desk-drawer shit, and I could have excavated for five minutes without finding anything more useful than pencil shavings and paper clips.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“But when the choice is between doing nothing and doing harm, surely nothing is the wiser option?”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“I chased my thoughts around in decreasing circles for a while before getting back to the point—which I’d been avoiding pretty strenuously.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“He knows I don’t come around just to sniff wine and swap gossip, but he hates the fact that our relationship is mutually abusive. Like all conspiracy nuts, he’s a romantic at heart.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“I knew better than to clutch at straws purely so that I could flog dead horses with them.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“I dangled for a moment like the bob on the end of a pendulum telling borrowed time.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“There’s a kind of silence that just has the overwhelming feel of someone trying desperately not to break it, and that was the kind of silence I was breathing in right then.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“I’d taken a few swipes with Occam’s razor, and that was what I’d ended up with, but that didn’t make it so. I really didn’t want to have to retreat and regroup with Peele and Alice breathing down my neck on either side. There were still those last few boxes, though. It was possible that Sod’s Law was operating, and that the ghost’s anchor was just going to turn out to be one of the documents at the very bottom of the stack.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“Jeśli oczy są zwierciadłem duszy, jej dusza miała horyzont zdarzeń.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know