Something More Than Night Quotes

“Then she rooted around until she found the bathroom medicine cabinet. It used to contain a bottle of aspirin. Now it contained her scream from the time she was bitten by a llama at a roadside petting zoo in Manitoba.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“The Pleroma is the totality. The superset. Magisteria are the subsets.” Eat your heart out, Bertrand Russell. “We all have one. Even you. Your own little slice of the divine.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“Funny thing about Gabby: you wouldn’t know it from looking at him, with his golden halo and platonic beauty, but the guy was something of a pack rat. He’d been collecting little odds and ends since at least the double-digit redshifts. The interior reality of Gabriel’s Magisterium burbled and shifted like convection currents in a star on the zaftig end of the main sequence. Because, I realized, that’s what they were. Dull dim light, from IR to X-ray, oozed past me like the wax in a million-mile lava lamp while carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen nuclei did little do-si-dos about my toes. Every bubble, every sizzle, every new nucleus, every photodissociation tagged something of interest to Gabriel. The heart of this star smelled of roses and musty libraries.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“I’ll say this for the celestial spheres, though: great acoustics. We’re talking Platonic ideals here. Pythagoras would have smashed his corny little harp across his knee if he’d heard it.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“Fire became an emerald mist where it touched his flesh. Its smoke smelled of cinnamon and sulfur, and tasted like pickled starlight. “Did you leave,” she asked, “or were you kicked out?” “Don’t get cute. I left,” said Bayliss. He muttered, “I really wish somebody had given old Milton a sock in the kisser when they’d had the chance.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“Speaking of which, a Dominion brushed past me carrying the final digits to a half-dozen transcendental numbers. It passed them along to a whirling Throne who appeared to be acting as an impromptu sub-foreman, who passed them up the chain to where they could do some good. A cloud of Powers surveyed the damage and orchestrated the repair effort with a thousand-dimensional bird’s-eye view. Somebody had built scaffolding out of a mathematics both consistent and complete (chew on that, Gödel) and now the spackle went on one axiom at a time.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“It was the kind of place where hard drinkers came to wrestle their demons while fallen angels drank alone in dark smoky corners.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“His wings, all six, shed embers of incandescent grace as he skidded across the night sky. And when he opened his mouths to scream, the Earth could do naught but shudder.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“Wait," he said. "Before we leave, can I, um, can I see what you really look like now?"

"Doofus. I look like your sister."

"I know. But there's more now. Right?"

It was a fair question. She said, "Okay. But you have to promise not to freak out. Just remember I'm still me, regardless of what it might look like."

"I promise."

And so it was there, in the reimagined and reconstructed memory of the kitchen she once shared with Ria, that Molly set aside her human form and showed her brother what she had become. The transition went more smoothly than it had in Bayliss's hotel room. She dialed it back when Martin flinched and shielded his eyes.

"Are you okay?" she asked, momentarily consumed with a vision of bloody tears streaking Bayliss's face.

"Oh, Moll," said Martin. He was crying. Not blood, though. "They turned you into starlight.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“Is it beautiful?”
“Really weird. But don’t get hung up on the angels. They’re mostly assholes.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“A Power sidled into the diner.
Say what you will about them, but they know how to make an entrance. An inky shadow wrapped in a lashing rain of ash and sleet, it rode on 144,000 constantly flickering legs of forked lightning. This particular jasper’s proper name was the basso profundo thrum of dark matter winging through the void, the fizz of neutrinos boiling off a moribund blue supergiant, and the bitter-tangerine taste of a quadrillion-dimension symmetry group. But I called it Sam for short.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“The first encounter report had come from some weak-tea heiligenschein type charting the edges of the quantum information paradox in realities with anisotropic causalities. (Kids these days. Whatever happened to popping down to Earth to play burning bush to a roving band of shepherds?)”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“Nobody ever oohs and aahs over wiring conduits and sewer lines.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“A cork isn’t useful unless you have a place to put it.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“Someone had awoken METATRON: the Voice of God.
I knew that dame was trouble the minute I saw her.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night