10
" The boy reported - after the Sergeant had slept for a few hours, which was not nearly enough - that YouTube had actually gone down for ten minutes under the weight of traffic. The story was truly global, truly immense: not Obama, not Justin Bieber, not Psy and not Bin Laden had ever touched this, he said. Not Khaled Saeed and not Mohamed Bouazizi, either. If Pippa Middleton and Megan Fox had announced their intention to marry during a live theatrical production of 50 Shades of Grey starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and then taken off their clothes to reveal their bodies tattooed with the text of the eighth Harry Potter novel, they might have approached this level of frenzy. But probably not, the boy said, because not everyone liked Benedict Cumberbatch. "
― Nick Harkaway , Tigerman
13
" On Mancreu he had no platoon to look after. Brighton House was vast and empty. There were two ballrooms in the east wing, both dim and sheeted. On his third day he had unwrapped a leather armchair in one of the drawing rooms so that he could sit, and discovered over those early weeks that he rather liked the quiet. In fact, he could spend ages in it. He had found it hard at first to listen without tracking things, without placing them and knowing them for friend or enemy, but gradually that automatic classification had faded away and he was left with rustling leaves and waves and a cowbell somewhere far off, and the idling of a fisherman’s outboard in the choppy water beneath the cliff. He walked the endless corridors on the upper floors alone, wondering what the rooms had seen. There was a local bird with a quite infuriating cry like a sneeze, and he amused himself by saying “bless you” whenever he heard it. Occasionally he thanked himself on behalf of the bird. After a while he found that he could forget the clock and even dismiss memory and awareness almost entirely, fade into the scenery and let his senses be everything that there was of him. It was wonderful. "
― Nick Harkaway , Tigerman
20
" Kershaw had long ago realized, apparently, that dealing with Brits was tricky. You had to listen to what a Brit was saying - which was invariably that he thought XYZ was a terrific idea and he hoped it went very well for you - while at the same time paying heed to the greasy, nauseous suspicion you had that, although every word and phrase indicated approval, somehow the sum of the whole was that you'd have to be a mental pygmy to come up with this plan and a complete fucking idiot to pursue it. After six years working with the Brits in various theatres he'd come to the conclusion that they didn't do it on purpose. The thing was, Brits actually thought that subtext was plain text. To a Brit, the modern English language was vested with hundreds of years of unbroken history and cultural nuance, so that every single word had a host of implications depending on who said it to whom, when, and how. British soldiers, for example, gave entire reports to their commanders by the way they said 'good morning, sir' and then had to spend half an hour telling them the detail, which was why the Brits always looked bored in briefings. They could sense the trajectory of the conversation, knew the bad news was coming now and the good news now and that there was a question on the end which needed thinking about. With a bit of work they could deduce the question, too, but they always waited politely for it to be asked so that no one felt rushed. "
― Nick Harkaway , Tigerman
