Quotes from Charles Stross

The glass isn't half-empty or half-full. What you're looking at is half a pint of depreciable assets sitting in a pint of capital infrastructure that can be amortized over two accounting periods. ... Is there an engineering one? ... Yes! It's quite simple: That's half a pint, all that's wrong is the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

I can get you a cheaper ticket if you let me amputate your legs: I can even take your thighs as a deposit," said the travel agent. He was clearly trying hard to be helpful: "It's not as if you'll need them where you're going, is it?" "Is it possible to find a better price by booking me on a different routing?" I asked. "I'm very attached to my limbs." (Quaint and old-fashioned, that's me.)

There's a faint popping noise, and the entire wall of the incident room shifts to the colour of the night sky above a Japanese city.

Cat. No doubled vision: it's a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it's a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right

Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it's semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty

We're going to need swords: lots of swords.

The universe is a brightly colored blur of fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises.

you young ones . . ." 'Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country has ever done for you?

Someday I'll write a textbook about personality profiling through possessions; but for now let's just say this example is screaming "megalomaniac!" at me.

A mother's love— Fuck love, Amber snarls, she wants power.

And rumor has it that the Central Ammunition Depot hanging off Box Tunnel still contains two thousand barrels of iron-tipped English longbow arrows, in case it becomes urgently necessary to re-fight the Battle of Crécy.

Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

Is not happening yet, contributes Boris. Singularity implies infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not happened.

And because my employers agree with me, and they're the government, you're outvoted.

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

And now my blood ran cold. Because if there's one thing worse than an IT manager who's feeling the chill wind of obsolescence blowing down his neck and consequently trying to contribute code to the repository like an actual working developer, it's an IT manager who's getting creative.

Back to my question: is it better to reign in Hell—or should I aspire to be a citizen in the early years of a better nation?

A vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment--with its redefinition of personhood--is rejected by the house of deputies: A universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to slavery.

A powerful glamour has engulfed the United States of America. It's not the first time, of course—that nation is a shining temple to amnesia with its foundations built atop the bones of vanished empires

First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life—oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness.

butcher, baker, fusion-reactor maker.

Reasons for cancellation order: 1. Baby-eating aquatic faerie equines do not exist.

This is rural England, after all; please set your watch back thirty years 

Private ownerships of a ...slave chip is illegal in many polities. It tends to be a government monopoly, much like other forms of violence. But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters.