“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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“Oh," I say. I have run out of dialogue. Sometimes I wish I were a character in a book and there as a writer out there giving me things to say. This is one of those times. I just stand there, feeling stupid.”
― James Howe, quote from The Misfits
“Her time with Charles had been brief and intense, consisting of stolen moments behind her stepfather's woodshed or clandestine meetings with her dashing British officer dressed as a civilian farmer so as not to arouse suspicion. But she had never spent a night with him. Had never lain her head atop his chest and fallen asleep while he stroked her hair and told her stories about his childhood, never dreamed in the protective circle of his embrace, never laughed until the tears rolled helplessly down her cheeks — as she had done last night when Gareth had told her what he and the Den of Debauchery members had done to a certain statue back in Ravenscombe ... She laughed just thinking about it. Purple parts, indeed! She”
― Danelle Harmon, quote from The Wild One
“Suicide is just a moment, Lexy told me. This is how she described it to me. For just a moment, it doesn't matter that you've got people who love you and the sun is shining and there's a movie coming out this weekend that you've been dying to see. It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, and you kind of dare yourself. You pick up a knife and press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window and you think, I could just do it. I could just do it. And most of the time, you look at the height and you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below - what if there are kids coming home from school and they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you're going to make them see? And the moment's over. You think about how sad it would've been if you never got to see that movie, and you look at your dog and wonder who would've taken care of her if you had gone. And you go back to normal. But you keep it there in your mind. Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose. You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your cheek, and the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same.... The day was hers to choose, and perhaps in that treetop moment when she looked down and saw the yard, the world, her life, spread out below her, perhaps she chose to plunge toward it headlong. Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air”
― Carolyn Parkhurst, quote from The Dogs of Babel
“I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of a cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.”
― Sonya Hartnett, quote from Surrender
“. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must’ve passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . .
But anyway so Bickle said, “Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?”
I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich.
He said, “You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there’s some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there’d have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That’s a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn’t bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn’t pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you’d start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you’d notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you’d start to wonder if somehow it didn’t get restocked while you slept. But you’d realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you’d keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you’d begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn’t explain it, you’d still need it. And you’d assume that you simply didn’t understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn’t place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You’d place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you’d come to realize you’d exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You’d worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You’d make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you’d start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you’d grow so frustrated you’d push it off this cliff.”
“Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?” I asked.
After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, “That’s the neocortex talking again.”
― Ryan Boudinot, quote from Blueprints Of The Afterlife
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