Tigerman Quotes

“Then he explained in a whisper that the plan was composed entirely of awesome. It was made and designed by the House of Awesome, from materials found in the deep awesome mines of Awesometania and it would be recorded in the Annals of Awesome - and nowhere else, because any other book would catch fire and explode from the awesome - and by its awesomeness it would be known from now until the crack of doom.”
― nick harkaway, Tigerman

“The boy reported - after the Sergeant had slept for a few hours, which was not nearly enough - that YouTube had actually gone down for ten minutes under the weight of traffic. The story was truly global, truly immense: not Obama, not Justin Bieber, not Psy and not Bin Laden had ever touched this, he said. Not Khaled Saeed and not Mohamed Bouazizi, either. If Pippa Middleton and Megan Fox had announced their intention to marry during a live theatrical production of 50 Shades of Grey starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and then taken off their clothes to reveal their bodies tattooed with the text of the eighth Harry Potter novel, they might have approached this level of frenzy. But probably not, the boy said, because not everyone liked Benedict Cumberbatch.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“In a lot of places, of course, the '80s had never really come to an end.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“Kershaw had long ago realised, apparently, that dealing with Brits was tricky. You had to listen to what a Brit was saying -- which was invariably that he thought XYZ was a terrific idea and he hoped it went very well for you -- while at the same time paying heed to the greasy, nauseous suspicion you had that, although every word and phrase indicated approval, somehow the sum of the whole was that you'd have to be a mental pygmy to come up with this plan and a complete fucking idiot to pursue it.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“The Brit abroad is always the voice of caution. Persons of other cultures are known to be undisciplined, prone to leaning out of car windows and cooking with garlic.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“She dances in the water. Perhaps that was as good as life got, after all.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“An ugly calm lay over the streets like the anticipation of a beating.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“He wore his medals. He had a surprising number of them, the real kind, not the ones you got for turning up. Although turning up was no mean thing, some days.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“On Mancreu he had no platoon to look after. Brighton House was vast and empty. There were two ballrooms in the east wing, both dim and sheeted. On his third day he had unwrapped a leather armchair in one of the drawing rooms so that he could sit, and discovered over those early weeks that he rather liked the quiet. In fact, he could spend ages in it. He had found it hard at first to listen without tracking things, without placing them and knowing them for friend or enemy, but gradually that automatic classification had faded away and he was left with rustling leaves and waves and a cowbell somewhere far off, and the idling of a fisherman’s outboard in the choppy water beneath the cliff. He walked the endless corridors on the upper floors alone, wondering what the rooms had seen. There was a local bird with a quite infuriating cry like a sneeze, and he amused himself by saying “bless you” whenever he heard it. Occasionally he thanked himself on behalf of the bird. After a while he found that he could forget the clock and even dismiss memory and awareness almost entirely, fade into the scenery and let his senses be everything that there was of him. It was wonderful.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“The interesting thing, to the Sergeant, was how these stories were at least in one way quite true to life: you didn’t know whether you were the hero or not until the end, because at any time up to that moment you could just get eaten and the rest would be about someone else. In fact you were never safe, because sometimes the monsters won.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“It was made and designed by the House of Awesome, from materials found in the deep awesome mines of Awesometania and it would be recorded in the Annals of Awesome.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“When you were utterly fucked and you didn’t know what to do, you got busy making sure everyone else was all right and told them not to worry and by the end of it there was a good chance you’d convinced yourself. And if you hadn’t, well, sooner or later you either died or you didn’t and either way the problem went away.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“If Pippa Middleton and Megan Fox had announced their intention to marry during a live theatrical production of Fifty Shades of Grey starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and then taken off their clothes to reveal their bodies tattooed with the text of the eighth Harry Potter novel, they might just have approached this level of frenzy. But probably not, the boy said, because not everyone liked Benedict Cumberbatch.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“... so that any time anyone looked up, expecting out of habit to see Shola, they caught his eye, and shared a moment with him, and the hole in the world was known and acknowledged.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“I'm a bit concerned about you, Jed. If you think Britain looks like a gusset, your girlfriends have been giving you a very strange idea of what sex is all these years."

"Seen from space, Lester. Space. The place where British people do not go because the British space programme is, what, two guys with a really long stick?"

"In that way, Jed, it is very much like US healthcare.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“Inoue was standing at the point of a spear composed of irate Japanese geeks, and he was pleased to see that the principal reaction on her face was a fizzing, imperious outrage.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“Kershaw had long ago realized, apparently, that dealing with Brits was tricky. You had to listen to what a Brit was saying - which was invariably that he thought XYZ was a terrific idea and he hoped it went very well for you - while at the same time paying heed to the greasy, nauseous suspicion you had that, although every word and phrase indicated approval, somehow the sum of the whole was that you'd have to be a mental pygmy to come up with this plan and a complete fucking idiot to pursue it. After six years working with the Brits in various theatres he'd come to the conclusion that they didn't do it on purpose. The thing was, Brits actually thought that subtext was plain text. To a Brit, the modern English language was vested with hundreds of years of unbroken history and cultural nuance, so that every single word had a host of implications depending on who said it to whom, when, and how. British soldiers, for example, gave entire reports to their commanders by the way they said 'good morning, sir' and then had to spend half an hour telling them the detail, which was why the Brits always looked bored in briefings. They could sense the trajectory of the conversation, knew the bad news was coming now and the good news now and that there was a question on the end which needed thinking about. With a bit of work they could deduce the question, too, but they always waited politely for it to be asked so that no one felt rushed.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“His perceptions of copperhood were formed by the dream of England, still. A copper was a bloke in a slightly silly hat who walked the beat, talked to shopkeepers about the price of fish, and sorted out young ruffians. You didn't attack him. It was like attacking a field of wheat, and anyway, you'd have to answer to his mum.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“He lounged and exhaled, and felt some small part of himself relax, like the moment when the elastic band on a child’s toy plane, wound and wound until the twisting redoubles upon itself and then let go to power the propeller, spasms once and releases that second layer of knots. He”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“Real life has no understanding of proper structure,” the boy said, “which is why news stories are always made of little lies.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“Which knew and understood and did not shy away from the understanding that there would be pain. Which could accept shattering, could reassemble itself, could stand taller than before.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“I can show him how to be the right kind of stupid.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“It was his experience that one did poorly by involving oneself in matters of local religion. The world looked one way if you believed, and another if you did not, and that was all there was to it.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“For an island with no future, Mancreu had a great deal of present.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“The silence you feel belongs to you. To everyone else, it’s just another day.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“I greatly respect my colleagues from Kiev and their massive integrity, even if they do occasionally poison the shit out of one another as part of the natural flow of democratic give-and-take.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“In the Mancreu worldview, Americans were people who got up early and ran five kilometres before breakfast and urged you to improve yourself. They seemed to believe that the right mixture of Nike, granola and hard work would turn anyone, anywhere in the world, into a millionaire. And, of course, there were darkside Americans too, the ones where all that virtue and enthusiasm found its outlet in villainy, whether for personal gain or the security of the state. It was tricky, with Americans, because you never knew which you were getting.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“He concluded that governments were like wars: the reasons and the faces might change, but it was still the same dying over the same soil.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman

“There were a lot of positions in the world for someone who kept his mouth shut and filled a comfy chair. Far fewer for someone who actually did what the job suggested he should.”
― Nick Harkaway, Tigerman