Europe in Winter Quotes

“Life is often absurd; all you can do is keep putting one foot in front of the other, looking for the joke in things – because there is always a joke, even if it’s bitter and sour – hoping for the best and trying not to be too broken when it doesn’t happen.   ”
― Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Winter

“Never coming back here, she thought.
With a groan, she levered herself into a sitting position and discovered a painful crick in her neck. Never ever. She launched herself off the bed and limped over to the door and put here eye to the viewer, was treated to a fish-eye view of a small, dapper, well-dressed man holding a bunch of white roses.
Okay. Man with flowers. Carey looked around the room. The windows opened on short tethers so guests couldn't throw furniture or each other out into the street, and she was too high to jump anyway. She looked around the room again, looking for possible weapons. There was a rickety-looking chair by the desk in the corner, but it would probably fall to bits even before she hit anyone with it. She looked through the viewer. The little man knocked again. Not urgently, not in an official we-have-come-to-take-you-to-the-gulag kind of way, but in the manner of a gentleman visiting his lady friend with a nice bunch of roses.”
― Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Winter

“He had thought that apart from the obvious signifiers of architecture and weather and language, all European cities were much the same, but Paris had proved him wrong. It was quite unlike anywhere else he had ever lived.”
― Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Winter

“Governments, nations, borders, they're all surface, they always have been. The real structure underlying it all is money, and the institutions which control it. Finance houses, banks, organised crime; if you drill down deep enough, it's all the same. Money has no nationality, no allegiance. While nations rise and fall, it remains the same. It's the most powerful polity of all.”
― Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Winter

“all you can do is keep putting one foot in front of the other, looking for the joke in things – because there is always a joke, even if it’s bitter and sour – hoping for the best and trying not to be too broken when it doesn’t happen.”
― Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Winter

“The Line was not so much a mode of transport, more a lifestyle choice.”
― Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Winter

“Everything is simple, in theory.”
― Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Winter

“Alone in the room, Gwen went through the time-honoured routine of the international business traveller. She jumped up and down and found the floor to be solid.”
― Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Winter

“You deal with the devil, you get burger franchises.”
― Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Winter

“She had to assume that she was under some kind of surveillance, because that was just what national intelligence agencies did, it was axiomatic. The most common form of surveillance – because it was the least labour-intensive – was monitoring of communications and internet usage, algorithms ceaselessly winnowing a torrent of content for hotphrases and keywords.”
― Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Winter

“A check of the drawers in the bedside tables revealed a Gideon Bible, a Qur’an, a Book of Mormon, and a leather-bound two-volume biography of L. Ron Hubbard. None of these books – actual books – appeared ever to have been opened, let alone read.”
― Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Winter

“You could go mad trying to cover every eventuality of surveillance.”
― Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Winter

“If this were some kind of entertainment, this would be roughly the point where Rupert said, "We don't have any more time, Professor, you must complete your research as soon as possible," but there was no great sense of urgency, no sense that it even mattered. It was just something that Rudi was interested in, for his own reasons. They could be working on this for years and still not understand it, and it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference.
He said, "Look, Professor, a lot of effort went into getting you that information. We'd be grateful if you could make some kind of sense of it reasonably soon.
"There is one thing I can tell you right now," Lev said..."Whoever is running this thing, they're really interested in railways.”
― Dave Hutchinson, Europe in Winter