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The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5) QUOTES

The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5) QUOTES

1 " The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up. "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

2 " I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed—Amazon logging every page turn and annotation—was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on. "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

3 " What you or I would recognize as an alien invasion by tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime Angleton would see as a teachable moment. "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

4 " Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right now it has convinced Pete that it is harmless, but I know better: just give them thumbs and in no time at all they’ll have us working in the tuna mines, delivering cans from now until eternity. (Hey, wait a minute, doesn’t this one have thumbs?) "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

5 " We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty. "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

6 " AFTER WE DO THE WASHING-UP, I GET TO SPEND THE REST OF the evening reading FAQs on cat maintenance on the web. It takes about half an hour to come to the unwelcome realization that they’re almost as complex as home-brew gaming PCs, and have even more failure modes. (When your gaming PC malfunctions it doesn’t stealthily dump core in your shoes.) "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

7 " Cat. No doubled vision: it’s a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

8 " Executions are a form of human sacrifice, after all, "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

9 " I set the self-portrait timer on the camera to ten seconds, handed it to the zombie, and sent him into the grid and through the door to blow himself up. Then things got weird. "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

10 " There will be plenty of backup and support, but she’s still going to have to do heartbreaking things to people who probably don’t understand why the pale woman with the bone-white violin and blood dripping from her fingertips is coming for them. "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

11 " WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES. In our youth, if we survive them, they’re called learning experiences or teachable moments or some-such. And that which does not maim or kill us usually makes us stronger, albeit sometimes also sadder and more cynical. "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

12 " if you want to work on data covering more than about one month you’re supposed to phone Mr. Jobsworth at BT and whine for help. "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

13 " There isn’t very much of the little boy left in Oscar; he didn’t get to his position without being able to keep it under very tight control. "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

14 " It popped up on my Outlook calendar, flagged in red like an inflamed pimple full of infected bureaucratic pus... I've been trying desperately to get it shifted, but no, it is stuck like a king-sized dildo in a guinea pig. "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

15 " (A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it’s parenthesized despair all the way down.))) "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

16 " (That was when the sprint on vampirism had been proposed and unanimously actioned as an emergency spike.) "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

17 " one of the quirkier cognitive disorders to which software project management is prone. "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

18 " Yes, Bob, I rather thought entity-relationship diagrams were your sort of thing. You’re the expert in Visio, aren’t you? Drawing up UML diagrams of fictional vampire brood hierarchies should keep you out of trouble for a while. "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

19 " over-endowed with WOMBATs.” (A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it’s parenthesized despair all the way down.))) "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

20 " (What band does the necromancer dance to? Boney M.) "

― Charles Stross , The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)