The Language of Bees

I would have stolen it for you, had I known you were interested." His voice was muffled by the door to the lumber room down the hallway, and I heard thumps and a crash. I raised my voice a trifle more than mere volume required. "I'm interested because she was. Both of them, come to that--Damian's art is infused with mystic symbols and traditions." Holmes' voice answered two inches away from my ear, making me jerk and spray a handful of maps across the floor. "Religion can be a dangerous thing, it is true," he remarked darkly, and went out again.

Holmes, you're a genius. So I have been told.

Normally, one is only conscious of the room around one, but when no-one else is present, one's awareness is free to fill all the space.

they turned up Regent Street, braced together against the sway of the pavement. [The Language of Bees, chapter 19]

The night air moved up towards the Downs, washing over sea and orchard. I breathed it in, and thought that henceforth, loneliness would smell to me like fermenting apples.

I found Shanghai to be the very essence of the Surrealist doctrine: If the world is mad, then the maddest man is the most sane." - Damian Adler

When the days close in and the last nectar ceases, the workers cast their gaze upon the drones, whom they have willingly fed and cosseted all the year long, but who are now only a burden on the food reserves, a threat to the future of the hive. So the females rise against the useless males and exterminate them every one, viciously ripping their former charges to pieces and driving any survivors out into the cold. The female is generally the more practical member of any species.

Religion has proved to be the refuge of so many scoundrels, one begins by doubting, and waits to be proven wrong. [The Language of Bees, chapter 30]