Home > Work > Joe Country (Slough House, #6)
1 " It turned out that in the governance of a nation’s security, many absurd situations had to be worked around: a toxic clown in the Foreign Office [Boris Johnson], a state visit by a narcissistic bed-wetter [Trump], the tendency of the electorate to jump off' the occasional cliff [Brexit]. "
― Mick Herron , Joe Country (Slough House, #6)
2 " It made little sense — the bad thing had already happened. Still, he felt as if he'd been diagnosed with a condition that was serious and complicated, but about which he remembered nothing. "
3 " ...he couldn’t help wondering how it had felt: refugees turning up from concentration camps, from a broken Europe, to find this bleak estate; its squat huts their new homes. There’d been watch towers and barbed wire fences. It can’t have looked like freedom. But freedom was measured, he supposed, by what you were leaving behind. "
4 " Several people warned me about taking on this role, you know. They seemed to think that there were easier ways of securing a seat in the Lords. "
5 " Catherine closed her eyes and saw it again: [Charles] Partner’s body in the bathtub; the contents of his head a red mess on the porcelain. A pulpy mixture, like trodden grapes. Some memories seared themselves on your mind, like a shadow on a wall after a nuclear flash. "
6 " That was what life was: you worked, sometimes you couldn't sleep, and your future was already being shaped. Until something crashed into it and knocked everything out of true. "
7 " Deniability was next to godliness in Westminster's corridors, and godliness itself second only to an unassailable majority. "
8 " The thought processes of a man who'd relax with his shoes off, his coat on, were foreign territory to Lech.Then again, the thought processes of Jackson Lamb, as revealed by their subsequent conversation, were probaby terra incognita to the psychiatric profession as a whole. "
9 " it’d be like choosing between Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan in a bare-knuckle death match. There ought to be a way both could lose. "
10 " The voice meant well, but should fuck off. "
11 " as with any mystery, you have to address the four Fs.” No one dared ask. “Who the fuck, what the fuck, where the fuck and why the fuck,” Lamb continued "
12 " The thing about somebody else's car was, it was automatically an all-terrain vehicle. "
13 " MARTIN KREUTZMER LIKED TO read the Guardian, because it kept him in touch with that strain of self-lacerating smugness which hoped to inherit the earth, but would have no clue what to do with it. "
14 " Antibiotics’ll clear it up.’ ‘They tend not to work with drink taken.’ ‘They’re drugs, they’re not fucking Irishmen. "
15 " River would suggest they [Lamb, Taverner] get a room, provided the room was soundproofed, locked, and had an alligator in it. "
16 " He raised a hand to forestall her response.‘Don’t bother denying it. We both know the PM’s a tormented creature [Theresa May]. Like one of those soft toys lorry drivers fix to their radiator grilles.That expression she wears, it’s terror at all the oncoming vehicles. "
17 " the potential for an unhappy ending being a recognised tax on female beauty. "
18 " Every footfall was helping return the city's streets to their unadorned state, while yesterday's snowflakes learned the lesson London offers to all who settle there: that while all are unique, most appear identical, both before and after being trodden upon. "
19 " This is what memory is: an abiding awareness that some things have vanished. And this is what consciousness is: the knowledge that more absences will come. "
20 " You built a life the way you’d build a wall, one brick on top of the other, but sooner or later, those first bricks were taken away. "