The Jennifer Morgue Quotes

“Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface...”
― charles stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“Britain is relying on you, Bob, so try not to make your usual hash of things.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“The Laundry field operations manual is notably short on advice for how to comport one’s self when being held prisoner aboard a mad billionaire necromancer’s yacht, other than the usual stern admonition to keep receipts for all expenses incurred in the line of duty.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“What entity aboard this ship exhibits all the personality traits of a cold-blooded killing machine, combined with the monstrous, overweening vanity and laziness of a convalescent war god lounging in their personal Valhalla while their minions prepare their armor? There's only one answer.

The Persian tomcat sits underneath the alien horror, washing itself without concern.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“He stabs at the mouse mat with one finger and I wince, but instead of fat purple sparks and a hideous soul-sucking manifestation, it simply wakes up his Windows box. (Not that there’s much difference.)”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“Fifteen minutes later I’m hunched over the steering wheel of a two-seater that looks like something you’d find in your corn flakes packet. The Smart is insanely cute and compact, does about seventy miles to a gallon, and is the ideal second car for nipping about town but I’m not nipping about town. I’m going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes. Meanwhile, I’m stuck driving something that handles like a turbocharged baby buggy. I’ve got my fog lights on in a vain attempt to deter the other road users from turning me into a hood ornament, but the jet wash every time another executive panzer overtakes me keeps threatening to roll me right over onto my roof. And that’s before you factor in the deranged Serbian truck drivers driven mad with joy by exposure to a motorway that hasn’t been cluster-bombed and then resurfaced by the lowest bidder.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“He monologued at me. With PowerPoint.★★ ★★He what? And you’re still sane? Obviously I underestimated you.★★”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“let slip the yapping chihuahuas of infowar”
― charles stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“There’s a very loud noise in my ear, not unlike a cat sneezing, if the cat is the size of the Great Sphinx of Giza and it’s just inhaled three tons of snuff.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“★★How boring, just another billionaire necromancer cruising the Caribbean in his thinly disguised guided missile destroyer, plotting total world domination.★★”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“Some people you just do not want to leave outside the tent pissing in, and in my early twenties, self-confident and naïve, I was about as safe to leave lying around unsupervised as half a ton of sweating gelignite.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“Then the screen comes on, showing a familiar menu on a blue background and I stare at it, transfixed, like a yokel who’s never seen a television before. Because it’s not a TV. It’s a flat-screen PC running Windows XP Media Center Edition. They can’t be that dumb. It’s got to be a trap, I gibber to myself. Not even the clueless cannon-fodder-in-jumpsuits who staff any one of the movies on the shelf would be that dumb!”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn’t just want to be free—it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“I don’t have a license to kill, but I don’t have orders not to kill in the course of my duties, either. Which realization I find extremely disturbing;”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“I don’t mind going without clothes, but being without a microprocessor is truly stripping down. It’s like asking a sorcerer to surrender his magic wand, or a politician to forswear his lies.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“Would you mind finding Eileen and asking her why she’s late? It doesn’t normally take her this long to terminate an employee.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“Someday I’ll write a textbook about personality profiling through possessions; but for now let’s just say this example is screaming “megalomaniac!” at me.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“Nobody taught me how to say no when a beautiful naked woman begs me to take my clothes off.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“Some people can mess up anything, and computational demonology adds a new and unwelcome meaning to terms like “memory leak” and “debugger.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“And because my employers agree with me, and they’re the government, you’re outvoted.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“Darmstadt is one of those German towns that, having been landscaped by Allied heavy bombers, rezoned by the Red Army, and rebuilt by the Marshall Plan, demonstrates perfectly that (a) sometimes it’s better to lose a war than to win one, and (b) some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed by architecture students.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“The perfect criminal, should he or she exist, would be the one who is never apprehended - indeed, the one whose crimes may be huge but unnoticed, or indeed miscategorized not as crimes at all because they are so powerful they sway the law in their favor, or so clever they discover an immoral opportunity for criminal enterprise before the legislators notice it. Such forms of criminality may be indistinguishable, at a distance, from lawful business; the criminal paragon of upper-class virtue, a face-man for Forbes.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“He shrugs, an aw-shucks gesture quite at odds with the rest of his mannerisms, and produces a grin from wherever he keeps his spare faces when he isn’t wearing them.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“Fifteen minutes later I’m hunched over the steering wheel of a two-seater that looks like something you’d find in your corn flakes packet. The Smart is insanely cute and compact, does about seventy miles to a gallon, and is the ideal second car for nipping about town; but I’m not nipping about town. I’m going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes. Meanwhile, I’m stuck driving something that handles like a turbocharged baby buggy.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“Everything – the entire 400-megabuck investment, ten years of Company black operations – depends on what happens in the next few hours.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“They’re nuts. Completely insane! I don’t get this gambling thing. Didn’t these people study statistics at university?”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“the first law of demonology is that if you can see it, it can see you. But”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“There’s an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief. The respite is short-lived. One moment I’m driving along a seemingly empty road, bouncing from side to side on the Smart’s town-car suspension as the hairdryersized engine howls its guts out beneath my buttocks, and the next instant the dashboard in front of me lights up like a flashbulb. I twitch spasmodically, jerking my head up so hard I nearly dent the thin plastic roof. Behind me the eyes of Hell are open, two blinding beacons like the landing lights on an off-course 747. Whoever they are, they’re standing on their brakes so hard they must be smoking. There’s a roar, and then a squat, red Audi sports coupe pulls out and squeezes past my flank close enough to touch, its blonde female driver gesticulating angrily at me. At least I think she’s blonde and female. It’s hard to tell because everything is gray, my heart is trying to exit through my rib cage, and I’m frantically wrestling with the steering wheel to keep the roller skate from toppling over. A fraction of a second later she’s gone, pulling back into the slow lane ahead of me to light off her afterburners. I swear I see red sparks shooting out of her two huge exhaust tubes as she vanishes into the distance, taking about ten years of my life with her.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

“There’s an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief. The respite is short-lived. One moment I’m driving along a seemingly empty road, bouncing from side to side on the Smart’s town-car suspension as the hairdryersized engine howls its guts out beneath my buttocks, and the next instant the dashboard in front of me lights up like a flashbulb.”
― Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue