6
" Life is magic.
I knew, without having to ask, what she meant. Life was not the magic of spells or enchantments or sorcery; or, it was, but that was not the point. Life created magic as an accidental by-product, it wasn't, definite article, absolute statement, A=B, magic. Life was magic in a more mundane sense of the word; the act of living being magic all of its own.
This was something we instinctively understood - it simply hadn't occurred to us that it might need explaining. "
― Kate Griffin , A Madness of Angels (Matthew Swift, #1)
10
" I spent the day with the pigeons, on a bench in Trafalgar Square, my bag of belongings huddled to my chest in case someone thought of taking them, and a pile of breadcrumbs at my feet. I let the pigeons congregate around me ... Eventually a local warden came up to me and said , "Sir, we ask people not to feed the pigeons," with such an expression of civic determination that I pretense not to understand English. Instead, I listed my way through various "eh?" sounds until, having exhausted his two words of French and three of Spanish, he concluded that since I was neither nationality, I wasn't worth the bother. "
― Kate Griffin , A Madness of Angels (Matthew Swift, #1)
13
" Offer me?" A shrill note of indignation entered her voice. "Young man, there are three things that make Britain great. The first is our inability at playing sports."
How does that make Britain great?"
"Despite the certainty of loss, we try anyway with the absolute conviction that this year will be the one, regardless of all evidence to the contrary!"
I raised my eyebrows, but that simply meant I could see my blood more clearly, so looked away and said nothing.
"The second," she went on, "is the BBC. It may be erratic, tabloid, under-funded and unreliable, but without the World Service, obscure Dickens adaptions, the Today Program and Doctor Who, I honestly believe that the cultural and communal capacity of this country would have declined to the level of the apeman, largely owing to the advent of the mobile phone!"
"Oh," I said, feeling that something was expected. "Oh" was enough.
"And lastly, we have the NHS!"
"This is an NHS service?" I asked incredulously.
"I didn't say that, I merely pointed out that the NHS makes Britain great. Now lie still. "
― Kate Griffin , A Madness of Angels (Matthew Swift, #1)
15
" Between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon, I broke into a total of six offices, one penthouse suite and a small bank, and cursed them all. I cursed the stones they were built on, the bricks in their walls, the paint on their ceilings, the carpets on their floors. I cursed the nylon chairs to give their owners little electric shocks, I cursed the markers to squeak on the whiteboard, the hinges to rust, the glass to run, the windows to stick, the fans to whir, the chairs to break, the computers to crash, the papers to crease, the pens to smear; I cursed the pipes to leak, the coolers to drip, the pictures to sag, the phones to crackle and the wires to spark. And we enjoyed it. "
― Kate Griffin , A Madness of Angels (Matthew Swift, #1)
16
" It was an excellent coat. It was long, grey, suspiciously blotched, smelt faintly of dust and old curries, went all the way down to my knees and overhung my wrists even when I stretched out my arms. It had big, smelly pockets, crunchy with crumbs, it boasted the remnants of a waterproof sheen, was missing a few buttons, and had once been beige. It was the coat that detectives down the ages had worn while trailing a beautiful, dangerous, presumably blond suspect in the rain, the coat that no one noticed, shapeless, bland and grey - it suited my purpose perfectly. "
― Kate Griffin , A Madness of Angels (Matthew Swift, #1)
17
" Magic is life,’ and that’s not quite right. You think that the study of magic, the understanding of it, gives you some sort of better grasp of life. Unfortunately, even I worked out that this isn’t quite true; it’s a bit skewed, see? We understand this. Magic is not life. Life is magic. Even the boring, plodding, painful, cold, cruel parts, even the mundane automatic reflexes, heart pumping, lungs breathing, stomach digesting, even the uninteresting dull processes of walking, swinging the knees and seeing with eyes, this is magic. This is what makes magic. "
― Kate Griffin , A Madness of Angels (Matthew Swift, #1)
18
" It goes something like this. You're walking along minding your own business, or you're on the underground or you're on a bus or something, but generally you're not paying much attention. And suddenly you look around and see all these other people and think, Hey, they can look at me and see me and I can see in my mind what I think they see, and when I'm gone they're going to keep on walking and theyr'e going to go and live their lives, and their thoughts are going to be just like mine, but different, but real and solid and alive and full of feeling and confusion and colour just like life, and, hey, isnt that cool! And it is.
And roughly around this time you're going to notice that you can feel trains under your feet or pipes bubbling, and you can hear the sound of traffic and voices and stuff; and then you'll probably look up at the things around you and think, Those buildings with the lights on look almost alive, like giant trees lit up with their own constellation of stars in every window, or maybe not if you're underground; and you'll realise that you can see the city all around, and it's so full of lives and life, and they're all buzzing around you, and every single individual is real and alive and passionate and full of mystery, and it's not just Joe Bloggs walking by who's like this, but that every part of the city is crawling with life. And you'll think, Hey, that's pretty damn sweet, everywhere I look there's life, and roughly around that point you'll realise you can hear rats and pigeons and thoughts and spells and colours and electricity, and that's probably when you started going a bit mad. "
― Kate Griffin , A Madness of Angels (Matthew Swift, #1)
