Quotes from Charles Stross

Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, for cultivating a florid and overblown prose style that covered the entire spectrum from purple to ultraviolet and took sixteen volumes of interminable epistles to get to the point [...]

Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake. It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.

They never tell you how heavy a corpse is in training school.

The Laundry field operations manual is notably short on advice for how to comport one's self when being held prisoner aboard a mad billionaire necromancer's yacht, other than the usual stern admonition to keep receipts for all expenses incurred in the line of duty.

Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.

The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused. (318)

programming is a job where Lovecraft meets tradecraft, all the time.

Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They're using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas.

there is a point at which eccentricity begins to impact operational effectiveness.

Pay attention: There will be an exam later.

There are two types of people in this world," Pete volunteers helpfully, "those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else.

but he understands she's twenty now (how did that happen?)

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

I wasn't expecting a stealth, supersonic, vertical take-off submarine fueled by the eerily whistling ghosts of necromantically murdered dolphins.

A historian who works for a bank: That's not the most likely background for someone who capers around the cosmos having adventures, is it?

He stabs at the mouse mat with one finger and I wince, but instead of fat purple sparks and a hideous soul-sucking manifestation, it simply wakes up his Windows box. (Not that there's much difference.)

Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons -- literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd. (331)

But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters.

American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor—that, and the army is less trigger-happy.

She turns and stalks off in search of other minions to intimidate, leaving you flexing your fingers and trying to decide whether you want to strangle her or go down on your knees and beg for lessons.

The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it?

Executions are a form of human sacrifice, after all

For programming is a job where Lovecraft meets tradecraft, all the time.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every insterstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker.