Angelmaker

I love you forever. I am sorry I cannot love you now.

And don't tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn't. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That's what we live with.

Never mind, never mind, let's get to the part where we smite the unrighteous. I've brought my most alarming teeth!

I shall now explain my plan. You may then speak, but only to amend the detail. The broad outline is not subject to negotiation. Are you ready? Good … I propose to have sex with you. I believe it will be excellent sex. Your obedience on one particular issue of timing it will be required to make it unforgettable sex. I will explain that issue as we go. At the moment, I wish to hear your inevitable objection to the general sex part of this plan.

Mercer opens hi mouth to argue, and Bastion Banister chooses this moment to open his mouth and snap at the circling bee. To his own evident surprise, he captures it, and there’s a curious little glonking noise as he swallows it whole. Mercer cringes slightly, as if expecting the dog to explode. Nothing happens. “All right,” Polly Cradle says, and then, pro forma, “Bastion, you’re a very naughty boy.” “Yes,” Mercer says acidly. “The dog has consumed a possibly lethal technological device of immense sophistication, deprived us of our only piece of tangible evidence and possibly doomed us all to some sort of arcane scientific retaliative strike. By all means, chide him severely with your voice. That will solve everyone’s problems.

Mercer,” Polly says, “we are now going to hug. As a group. The experience will be very un-English. It will be good for you. Do not speak, at all, especially not in an attempt to diffuse the emotional intensity of the situation.” They hug, somewhat awkwardly, but with great feeling. “Well,” Mercer says, after a moment, “that was certainly—” “I will hit you with a shovel,” Polly Cradle murmurs.

Joshua Joseph has no real hatred of modern technology - he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces, and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system....For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one that deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which humans use to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own little ecosystems.

The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it's so hard to do just one.

Joe, you did fine,” Mercer says. “You were great. But there is no question that we are in the shit. We are in the savage jungle. For some reason, which I do not yet apprehend, there are titans stirring in the deeps and shadows on the stairwell. As my youngest cousin Lawrence would say, we are up to our necks in podu. This, incidentally, is Reggie, who is one of my occasional thugs,” indicating the gnarled youth on his left. “Now retiring to become a vet, would you believe, but for the next ten minutes you can trust him with your life, only don’t, trust me instead. Anyway … good evening, and what the fuck is going on, and try the lamb, it’s excellent.

I do not know, at this point, whether Joshua Joseph Spork is the man of my life. He could be. I have given it considerable thought. The jury is still out. The issue between you and me is that you wish to deprive me of the opportunity to find out. Joe Spork is not yours to give or to withhold from me, Mr. Cummerbund. He is mine, until I decide otherwise. You have caused him grief, sullied his name, and you have hurt him. If anyone is going to make him weep, or lie about him, or even do bad things to him, it is me.

His grandfather was scathing about "speculative faith," which is the kind you get from worrying about the possibility that God exists and may be cross with you. Daniel Spork observed that God, if there is one, is well aware of the interior dialogue, and most likely unimpressed by it. Much better, he said, to get on with being the man you are, and hope like buggery that God thinks you did as well as could be expected. Hence all the lessons and strictures concealed in everyday objects. _Learn the shape of the world, know the mind of God._

Crotch biting menace:I have my mouth in close proximity to your genitals.Oh thou man who talks to my mistress over coffee.Do not irk or trifle with me! I possess but one tooth, oh, yes, for the rest were buried long ago in the flesh of sinners.Behold my jaws, upper and lower in righteous, symmetrical poverty.Move not, man of clocks, and heed my mistress, for she cherishes me, even in my foul old age.

Faith has always struck him as either a tremendous gift or an appalling deception, depending on whether there’s a God or not.

Just got to fnafflebrump caddwallame, all right?" Edie says, and no one pays attention. She learned at Lady Gravely's that nonsense which can be misheard is a very good way to lie without getting caught. People just insert whatever they think you must be doing, and - having lied to themselves on your behalf - are disinclined to check up on you.

You need to relax and be yourself, not whoever it is you’re trying to be in your mad little head. I bloody don’t, though. I’m me and I’m good at it.

Joe Spork opens the door. The man departs. Joe turns to Polly to say something about how they’re obviously not going to Portsmouth, and finds an oyster knife balanced on his cheek, just under his eye. “Can we be very clear,” Polly Cradle murmurs, “that I am not your booby sidekick or your Bond girl? That I am an independent supervillain in my own right?” Joe swallows. “Yes, we can,” he says carefully. “There will therefore be no more ‘Say hello, Polly’?” “There will not.

The game is fixed. Alwayas has been, always will be, and the only way out for a man is the gangster's road.

Dead like slipped on a bar of soap or like Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead piping?

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

Joe is never sure whether they're mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.

You've picked up a rummy habit," James Banister said cordially as they approached one another. "Sort of a crouch. You look a bit... well, I'm sorry, but you look a bit Victor Hugo, if you catch my drift. Would you like to adjourn to a cathedral or something?

[A]ll that mystical jabber about expecting the unexpected is just so much toffee. Expect the unexpected, Edie was told by a sour veteran sergeant in Burma, and the expected will walk up to you and blow your expectations out through the back of your head. Expect the expected, just don’t forget the rest.

He seems an unlikely companion for a woman like Edie Banister, but the world, Daniel once observed, is a great honeycombed thing composed of separated mysteries.

Her eyes are very bright. She loves senses, loves the world. He finds that…admirable, and a bit daunting. I am a mole. I am hiding, in the company of a woman who adores the sunlight and the rain.

It is known, among coppers and criminals alike, that society can be policed only because it consents. When the burden of law or government is too great, or too oppressive, or when economic need or famine breaks the normal course of life, there simply are not – can never be – enough coppers to hold the line.

Ari regards cats as lessons in the journey through life. Cats, he explains, are divine messengers of patience. Joe, one shoulder still sore from a near miss two weeks ago, says they are Satanic messengers of discord and pruritus. Ari says this is possible, but by the workings of the ineffable divinity, even if they are Satanic messengers of discord and pruritus, they are also tutors sent by the Cosmic All. “They are of themselves,” Ari says, clutching this morning’s consignment of organic milk, some of which is leaking through the plastic, “an opportunity for self-education.

When your friend is decomposing, surely you owe it to them to inhale their death. To do otherwise seems impossible prim.

Joseph has no great hatred of modern technology—he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system.