The Fuller Memorandum Quotes

“Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos – in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever – was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of -5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake. It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“There is a philosophy by which many people live their lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you've got, the less shit you have to eat.

These people are often selfish brats as kids, and they don't get better with age: think of the shifty-eyed smarmy asshole from the sixth form who grow up to be a merchant banker, or an estate agent, or one of the Conservative Party funny-handshake mine's a Rolex brigade.

(This isn't to say that all estate agents, or merchant bankers, or conservatives are selfish, but that these are ways of life that provide opportunities of a certain disposition to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Bear with me.)

There is another philosophy by which people live their lives, and it goes thus: You will do as I say or I will hurt you.

. . . Let me draw you a Venn diagram with two circles on it, denoting sets of individuals. They overlap: the greedy ones and the authoritarian ones. Let's shade in the intersecting area in a different color and label it: dangerous. Greed isn't automatically dangerous on its won, and petty authoritarians aren't usually dangerous outside their immediate vicinity -- but when you combine the two, you get gangsters and dictators and hate-spewing preachers.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“I shove my reading matter back into my messenger bag (it’s a novel about a private magician for hire in Chicago—your taxpayer pounds at work) and go to stand in the doorway.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“Like I said: the only god I believe in is coming back. And when he arrives, I’ll be waiting with a shotgun.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“I’ve met gibbering horrors from other universes, been psychically entangled with a serial killer fish goddess, stalked by zombies, imprisoned by a megalomaniac billionaire, and I’ve even survived the attention of the Auditors (when I was young, foolish, and didn’t know any better). But I’ve never lost a classified file before, and I don’t ever want there to be a first time. I force myself to sit down”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“To put it bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. The more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“We've been brought up to think of the Victorians as prudes, horrified by a glimpse of table leg, but that myth was constructed in the 1920s out of whole cloth, to give their rebellious children an excuse to point and say, "We invented sex!" The reality is stranger: the Victorians were licentious in the extreme behind closed doors, only denying everything in public in the pursuit of probity.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“All right.” Panin sips at his wine. “Excuse me, but—there is a personal connection?” “What?” “You appear unduly upset ...” “Yes.” She looks at her hands. “The missing officer is my husband.” Panin puts his glass down and leans back, very slowly, with the extreme self-control of a man who has just realized he is sharing a table with a large, ticking bomb. “Is there anything I can do to help?” “Yes.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“Summer in England   THOSE WORDS ARE SUPPOSED TO CONJURE UP HALCYON SUNNY afternoons; the smell of new-mown hay, little old ladies on bicycles pedaling past the village green on their way to the church jumble sale, the vicar’s tea party, the crunching sound of a fast-bowled cricket ball fracturing the batsman’s skull, and so on.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“For instance, I never wrote to my MP to express my displeasure at the widespread deployment of sleeping policemen around the capital. It never occurred to me to do so: Mo and I don’t own a car, and speed bumps”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“Today’s been shit and Tomorrow is quite possibly going to be worse -- but it can wait for a while.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“the shadow puppet play of televisual hallucinations.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“Cultists. They’re like cockroaches. We humans are incredibly fine-tuned by evolution for the task of spotting coincidences and causal connections. It’s a very useful talent that dates back to the bad old days on the savannah (when noticing that there were lion prints by the watering hole and then cousin Ugg went missing, and today there are more lion prints and nobody had gone missing yet, was the kind of thing that could save your skin). But once we developed advanced lion countermeasures like stone axes and language, it turned into our secret curse. Because, you see, when we spot coincidences we assume there’s an intentional actor behind them”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“I pull out the NecronomiPod and fire it up. Happy fun icons glow at me: Safari, YouTube, Horned Skull, Settings, Bloody Runes, Messaging, Elder Sign, you know the interface. Bloody Runes gets me into the ward detector, which is showing the usual options. I point the camera at the door”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“Ungern Sternberg died in September 1921, executed by a Bolshevik firing squad after Trotsky's soldiers captured him." Choudhury taps his folio again, looking severe: "He was a very bad man, you know! He had a habit of burning paperwork.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“The overall pattern of their activity focuses on memorabilia from the Russian Civil War, specifically papers and personal effects from the heirs of White Russian leaders, but they've also been looking into documents and items relating to the Argenteum Astrum, which is on our watch list--BONE SILVER STAR--along with documents relating to Western occultist groups of the pre-war period. Aleister Crowley crops up like a bad penny, naturally, but also Professor Mudd, who tripped an amber alert. Norman Mudd.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN IS THE CODE NAME FOR THE END OF the world.
You might have noticed that Mo and I have no children. We don't even have a pet cat, the consolation prize of the overworked urban middle classes. There's a reason for this. Would you want to have children, if you knew for a fact that in a couple of years you might have to cut their throats for their own good?”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“I’m possessed, recursively.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“It seems I have not been truly myself for a long time,” he says, barely whispering, a dry, papery sound like files shuffling in a dead document archive.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“Russian espionage directed against the West has been rising since 2001. We kind of forgot that you don’t need communism to set up an east/west squabble between the Russian Empire and Western Europe—in fact, communism was a distraction.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“MONDAY DAWNS BRIGHT AND HOT AND EARLY, AND I FIND MY SELF waking to the happy knowledge that I can go back to work, and nobody will order me home.”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum

“I’m a believer. And like I said, I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos—in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever—was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.     A”
― Charles Stross, The Fuller Memorandum