The Devil You Know

I took a strong dislike to him right then to save time and effort later.

It wasn't what I was expecting, but like I've always said: if life gives you lemmings, jump off a cliff.

Even at its worst, there are tiny holes in the midnight canopy of my bad luck.

My mum’s getting married,” said Cheryl. “Again. At the Brompton Oratory. Fourth time around the track, this is. They don’t say ‘Till death us do part’ for my mum; they say ‘Who’s holding ticket number twenty-three?

The key fob played the first bar of Für Elise as I locked the car up. I hoped that Beethoven's ghost was out there somewhere, making the night hideous for the managing director of Ford's.

All in all, I was feeling the smug satisfaction of a job well begun and therefore half done.

I was feeling as though my eyeballs had been scooped out, roughly polished with a sanding wheel, and then shoved back more or less into their right places. My head was full of gray cheese instead of brains.

They weren’t random; nothing with a human mind as the operating system ever can be. But they were random enough.

It wasn’t what I was expecting, but like I’ve always said, if life gives you lemmings, jump off a cliff.

Fortune favors the pure of heart and the brassy of bollock.

You move on. You move back. On because you're always getting older, back because there's always a set of habits and routines to catch you and suck you back in when your guard is down.

And for Peter... well, sometimes cruelty is kindness in disguise. Sometimes pain is the best teacher. Sometimes it does you no harm to realize that there's a limit to what you can get away with.

I could dodge the kick, but the stable door was already down - and I hadn't even realised it until I saw the splinters.

to me it was looking like one of those logic problems that end up with the proposition that all men are Socrates, and Socrates is a rubber chicken.

We have thirty people on staff, including several part-timers, and I believe everyone has seen her at least once. It was very frightening at first. As I said, she tended to favor the end of the afternoon, and at this time of year, it’s often dark by four. It was very disconcerting to be looking for a book in the stacks and then to look up and see her standing at the end of the aisle. Staring at you. With her feet a few inches above the floor or her ankles sinking into it.

The doorbell made a severe, functional buzzing sound like a dentist’s drill sliding off recalcitrant enamel.

My hand was a balloon sculpture, nerveless and fragile; it wouldn’t do what it was told.

a good stare communicates itself by means other than sight.

a pause so heavy it wasn’t just pregnant but ready to break its waters and deliver.

William Blake is dreaming of Jerusalem under that sod, and Daniel Defoe is probably dreaming about something a fair bit earthier. You’ve also got John Owen and Isaac Watts, the reservoir dogs of eighteenth-century theology. What can I tell you? I just feel at ease in their company.

It was full of the usual strata of desk-drawer shit, and I could have excavated for five minutes without finding anything more useful than pencil shavings and paper clips.

But when the choice is between doing nothing and doing harm, surely nothing is the wiser option?

I chased my thoughts around in decreasing circles for a while before getting back to the point—which I’d been avoiding pretty strenuously.

He knows I don’t come around just to sniff wine and swap gossip, but he hates the fact that our relationship is mutually abusive. Like all conspiracy nuts, he’s a romantic at heart.

I knew better than to clutch at straws purely so that I could flog dead horses with them.

I dangled for a moment like the bob on the end of a pendulum telling borrowed time.

There’s a kind of silence that just has the overwhelming feel of someone trying desperately not to break it, and that was the kind of silence I was breathing in right then.

I’d taken a few swipes with Occam’s razor, and that was what I’d ended up with, but that didn’t make it so. I really didn’t want to have to retreat and regroup with Peele and Alice breathing down my neck on either side. There were still those last few boxes, though. It was possible that Sod’s Law was operating, and that the ghost’s anchor was just going to turn out to be one of the documents at the very bottom of the stack.