“This should be a pleasant little interview. All I have to do is put on my scary face."
"You have a scary face?" Ingrid sounded skeptical.
"Yes," said Myfanwy indignantly. "I have a very scary face."
Ingrid surveyed her for a moment. "You may wish to take off the cardigan then, Rook Thomas," she advised tactfully. "The flowers on the pocket detract somewhat from your menace.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“Yes, Minister, it turns out that there was a mysterious force that caused that plane to crash. We call it gravity.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“Now, do you mind telling me why you have all these guns lying around? Are you afraid the paperwork will rise up against you?'
'Oh, no. I'm going to use the guns as paperweights.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“And the minibar in my hotel room was mysteriously emptied."
"By arcane forces beyond the understanding of normal human beings?" asked Myfanwy as she sifted through the in-box. It was the sort of question you learned to ask automatically when you worked with the Checquy.
"No, it was me," admitted Shantay without a shred of embarrassment.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“I’m not bipolar, I’ve just had a bipolar life foisted upon me.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“According to Thomas, the city [of Bath] had once been a veritable hotbed of manifestations, with every sorcerer, bunyip, golem, goblin, pict, pixie, demon, thylacine, gorgon, moron, cult, scum, mummy, rummy, groke, sphinx, minx, muse, flagellant, diva, reaver, weaver, reaper, scabbarder, scabmettler, dwarf, midget, little person, leprechaun, marshwiggle, totem, soothsayer, truthsayer, hatter, hattifattener, imp, panwere, mothman, shaman, flukeman, warlock, morlock, poltergeist, zeitgeist, elemental, banshee, manshee, lycanthrope, lichenthrope, sprite, wight, aufwader, harpy, silkie, kelpie, klepto, specter, mutant, cyborg, balrog, troll, ogre, cat in shoes, dog in a hat, psychic and psychotic seemingly having decided that this was the hot spot to visit.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“She was tall, and dressed in the kind of casual clothes that will let you kill someone easily and won't draw attention from passersby. Khakis are good for this sort of thing.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“You look like Cinderella," said Val in awe.
"Yeah, if she'd been into bondage and had Christian Dior for a godmother.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“It is curious how the passing of lifetimes will change a man.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“Checquy statistics indicate that 15 percent of all men in hats are concealing horns.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“I'm going back to sleep,' she said, lying back down. 'I shall see if there's anyone interesting asleep in America.'
'That seems rather like a contradiction in terms, ma'am.'
'God, you're such a snob.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“She was trying to find the section that described the penalties for treason. She'd browsed through the section at one point and vaguely recalled a long list of punishments culminating with the guilty party being ritually trampled to death by the population of the village of Avebury, which seemed unlikely, or at least somewhat difficult to arrange.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“I've always been a pretty good researcher," said Bronwyn modestly.
Oh, so that we share, thought Myfanwy, but you didn't inherit the power to make people shit themselves. You've got to love the randomness of genetics.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“Behind me, Ingrid made a sort of muffled snorting sound. I can only assume she was choking on a breath mint. I shot her a look, hoping she hadn't heard anything, and saw she was wearing a poker face, which could only mean she'd heard everything.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“If you want to switch jobs, then you can come over here right now and balance the extermination budget in London while (shuffling through papers) figuring out why the hell a two-door wardrobe in the spare room of a country house is considered to be a matter of national concern!”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“Not that a locked door made a difference to me, since we’d all been rigorously trained in “the ladylike arts of breaking and entering,”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“I'm not entirely certain who arranged to have the lighting in the Rooks' offices and quarters hooked up to the Panic Lines, but it has taught me to flinch violently when a lightbulb ceases to work.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“We were ushered into the special reception room that important people go to so they won't have to ensure Customs. It's luxurious and private, and you don't have to mingle with the public. It's the room that you wait in if you are very, very powerful and once got shitfaced with Joseph of Arimathea. Or if you are Mick Jagger.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“With the sort of power these new processes granted them, the members of the brotherhood were in the perfect position to seize power. In any other country, a massive, bloody war would have ensued. Horrors would have stalked the land, unholy amalgamations of flesh would have fought on the fields, and the nights would have new, unspeakable terrors.
Fortunately, this is Belgium we're talking about.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“Oh, well, thanks an awful lot, Thomas, Myfanwy thought bitterly. It sounds like I'm the Defense Minister of Ghosts and Goblins, but as long as the job is "all fairly self-explanatory," I've no doubt it will be fine. The country might get overrun by brownies and talking trees, but what the hell--there's always Australia!”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“I want to have the whole English experience. High tea, supervising manifestations, taking the waters, going to Harrods, discussing possible international conspiracies.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“Dear You, The body you are wearing used to be mine.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“She felt a little pang of fondness for the woman who’d lived in her body. You couldn’t help liking someone who put all this effort into making you feel welcome.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“Rook Thomas, you look different somehow."
"Well, I recently got the shit kicked out of me," she said.
"Ah, that would be it then.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“This is ridiculous, she thought. I’m possessed of terrifying powers. Why am I relying on a ridiculous little gun that I picked because I thought it was cute? I don’t need this thing. She threw it contemptuously over her shoulder. Damn right! I took out a house of weird fungal cultists that had devoured three teams of supernatural SWAT teams. I am a badass. She paused and expanded her senses outward, searching for any kind of life. Okay, nothing. At least, she thought uneasily, nothing that I can detect. But then why does it smell so bad down here? There’s something foul wandering the underground tunnels beneath my”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“A clean mind and a clean body make for a perfect weapon”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“As a result, we receive panicked calls from police chiefs, government ministers, members of the aristocracy, military officers, councillors, intelligence agents, churchmen, surgeons, diplomats, hospital administrators, etc. We also have people placed in key organizations who keep us abreast of significant developments. Still, despite all these connections, we maintain our secrecy. Our name does not appear on any piece of paper outside of our organization. In fact, very few on the outside know that we exist. People are given a phone number to call, and information comes to us through twisty channels. Our computer network is not connected to any external system. If you try to track us down, you will not find us, but we will find you.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
“She’d neglected makeup entirely, and those damn black eyes lent her the appearance of a raccoon. A raccoon that had gotten hit in the face. After a lifetime of poor nutrition. The silence was broken only by the humming of the lift, and it felt conspicuous.”
― Daniel O'Malley, quote from The Rook
Daniel O'Malley
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“Let others say what they will of the efficacy of prayer, I believe in it, and I shall pray. Thank God! Yes, I shall always pray,”
― Sojourner Truth, quote from Narrative of Sojourner Truth
“Our world was a battleground on which good and evil clashed, and many of the combatants on the dark side were known to everyone. Terrorists, dictators, politicians who were merchants of lies and hate, crooked businessmen in league with them, power-mad bureaucrats, corrupted policemen, embezzlers, street thugs, rapists, and their ilk waged part of the war, and their actions were what made the evening news so colorful and depressing. But those fighting in that dark army had their secret schemes, too, intentions and desires and goals that would make their public villainy seem almost innocent by comparison. They were assisted by other politicians who concealed their hatred and envy, by judges who secretly had no respect for the law, by clergymen who in private worshipped nothing but money or the tender bodies of children, by celebrities who trumpeted their concern for the common man while in their off-screen lives assiduously hobnobbing with and advancing the interests of the elite of elites.… The war unseen by most people was one of clandestine militias, unincorporated businesses, unchartered organizations, philosophical movements that could not survive fresh air and sunlight, secretive coalitions of lunatics who didn’t recognize their own lunacy, nature cults and science cults and religious cults.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Saint Odd
“A bicycle?” Amos leaned on the breakfast bar. “Sure. They don’t need fuel, they don’t get sick. Most of the repairs, you can handle on your own. You’re looking for post-apocalyptic transportation, bikes are the way to go.”
― quote from Nemesis Games
“Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects. When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that’s when the details take on larger meanings.”
― David Byrne, quote from How Music Works
“It's rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible "Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family". It's not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence come from and what we can do about it a lot more productively. Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time.”
― Rebecca Solnit, quote from Men Explain Things to Me
Wonder
Lover Awakened
Neuromancer
Redeeming Love
The Waste Land
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