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The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8) QUOTES

The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8) QUOTES

1 " corruption is defined in narrow terms to nail the poor deluded fool who slips a £20 note inside the cover of their passport before handing it to the Border Force officer who is checking travel documents with a CCTV camera looking over her shoulder. There’s nothing corrupt about the government minister who announces new and impossible performance targets for a hitherto just-about-coping agency that manages transport infrastructure, drives it into a smoking hole in the ground, and three years later retires and joins the board of the corporation that subsequently took over responsibility for maintaining all the bridges on behalf of the state—for a tidy annual fee, of course. After all, the minister is a demonstrable expert on the ownership and management of bridges, and there’s no provable link between their having set up the agency for failure and their subsequently being granted a nonexecutive directorship that gets them their share of the rental income from the privatized bridge, is there? "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

2 " where it’s not unusual for certain senior personnel to keep such a low profile that only the payroll computers in HR can remember their names. "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

3 " It’s almost as if Congress has no idea that a giant occult power struggle for control of the US government is in progress … or perhaps it’s over already, and a ruthless media clamp-down by tongue-eating mind control parasites is the only thing keeping the world from learning about the takeover of DC by gibbering alien nightmares. "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

4 " either they’re trying to upsell you a fifty-quid-a-head artisanal pork pie (serving this week: Peppa Pig’s Uncle Bertie’s left haunch, marinaded in a drizzle of preschoolers’ tears) or "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

5 " In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window. "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

6 " can’t decide whether his next show should be a sitcom about government bureaucrats or a horror series "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

7 " Viewed in the right light, a little sprinkle of free market pixie dust can turn the drabbest of public sector services (sewerage, for example) into a rainbow-hued profit unicorn. "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

8 " Some knowledge is inherently corrupting, "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

9 " But I can’t be in three places at once!” “Tough,” says Mo, and that shell-like expression cracks into a grin. “You’re management now; isn’t it time you learned to delegate? "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

10 " The most efficient kind of censorship isn’t the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman; it’s the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we’re afraid that if we say what we think everyone around us will think us strange. "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

11 " And because this is now a political problem, the usual political syllogism applies: (a) is a problem: Something Must Be Done, (b) is Something, Therefore (b) Must Be Done. "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

12 " Then the red light comes on above the camera, and I’m live on a Monday evening special crisis edition of Newsnight. "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

13 " the defense establishment of the United States of America is so complicated, not to say baroque, that many different agencies can accomplish any given task. Want to invade a small Caribbean island? Who you gonna call: the Army or the Navy’s Army, which is to say, the Marine Corps? Want to call in an air strike? You could ask the Air Force … but the US Navy has lots and lots of fighter jets and tends to get annoyed if they’re left out. And the Army of the Navy has its own Air Force, the USMC Air Corps, and they’ve got aircraft carriers. It "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

14 " But otherwise it’s darkness, darkness, as far as the eye can see. "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

15 " It’s lovely, like the moment of stunned disbelief immediately after you finally snap and tell the world’s most annoying office-mate to shut the fuck up—the moment of silence when they have no comeback and you finally had the last word. "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

16 " concentrate on my deep breathing and the whole mindfulness shtick and on trying not to casually squeeze the contents of a taxiing aluminum tube of intercontinental goodness into my imaginary mouth—it’s a Boeing 777 or Airbus A330 and it’s nearly two miles away, a distantly rational part of me realizes— "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

17 " It’s almost as if Congress has no idea that a giant occult power struggle for control of the US government is in progress … or perhaps it’s over already, and a ruthless media clamp-down by tongue-eating mind control parasites is the only thing keeping the world from learning about the takeover of DC by gibbering alien nightmares. I "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

18 " Some invasions barely warrant the name. "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

19 " The vampire has just realized she’s in a meeting populated exclusively by spooks and people who go bump in the night. "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)

20 " Crawling eldritch horrors don’t get planning permission unless they’re Trump’s hairpiece.) "

― Charles Stross , The Delirium Brief (Laundry Files, #8)