Quotes from Charles Stross

The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn't just want to be free—it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors.

There are good ways and bad ways to get my attention. Whacking on my ego with a crowbar will get my attention, sure, but it's not going to leave me well disposed to the messenger.

Are they by any chance a quiverfull ministry?" Pete's lips thin. "Yes." The word "quiverfull" sets my alarm bells ringing, and clearly upsets Mo. It goes back to Psalm 127, which refers to having many children as having a full quiver. They're arrows for the Lord, and a number of evangelical churches have adopted the theory that you can never have too much ammunition.

Yes, Derek," I tell him, "we hauled you four thousand miles out of your comfort zone just so you could make a saving throw vs. Cthulhu. Happy now?

It popped up on my Outlook calendar, flagged in red like an inflamed pimple full of infected bureaucratic pus... I've been trying desperately to get it shifted, but no, it is stuck like a king-sized dildo in a guinea pig.

Olga noticed Mirium looking at her blankly. 'Don't you pray?' she asked. 'Pray?' Mirium shook her head. 'I don't understand - ' 'Prayers! Oh, yes, I forgot. Didn't dear Roland say that on the other side everybody is pagan? You all worship some dead god on a stick, impaled or something disgusting, and pray in English,' she said with relish.

Although I am unconvinced that I desire life, I am not yet ready to embrace death.

the ads made me feel bilious and love-stricken, invaded and debauched by a coldly mechanical lust for whatever fetish the desire machines were pushing at their victims at any given instant.

It's almost as if Congress has no idea that a giant occult power struggle for control of the US government is in progress Ã¢â'¬Â¦ or perhaps it's over already, and a ruthless media clamp-down by tongue-eating mind control parasites is the only thing keeping the world from learning about the takeover of DC by gibbering alien nightmares.

There is cold comfort to be drawn from the sure and certain knowledge that the correct way to deal with the problem you're facing in your job involves napalm, if you find yourself confronting a dragon and you aren't even carrying a cigarette lighter.

Horror fiction allows us to confront and sublimate our fears of an uncontrollable universe, but the threat verges on the overwhelming and may indeed carry the protagonists away. Spy fiction in contrast allows us to believe for a while that the little people can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over the overwhelming threats that permeate their universe.

Nobody taught me how to say no when a beautiful naked woman begs me to take my clothes off.

This is a woman who models herself on Margaret Thatcher, only without the warmth and compassion.

One does not simply walk into Mordor these days; one drives a rented Cadillac Escalade the size of a county, shiny black and chrome, with a fake walnut dash, and enough black leather to clothe a battalion of Hell's Angels.

I notice that Andy is watching our exchange with the still, silent fascination of a fly on the wall that is canny enough to be aware of the existence of swatters.

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence or overwork?

money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.

After a couple of years of death by bureaucratic snu-snu (too many committee meetings, too many tedious IT admin jobs)

Darmstadt is one of those German towns that, having been landscaped by Allied heavy bombers, rezoned by the Red Army, and rebuilt by the Marshall Plan, demonstrates perfectly that (a) sometimes it's better to lose a war than to win one, and (b) some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed by architecture students.

Just as individuals age and die, so do lineages: Only debt is forever.

if you want to work on data covering more than about one month you're supposed to phone Mr. Jobsworth at BT and whine for help.

There's no briefing sheet on what to do when a supernatural soul-sucking horror disguised as a beautiful woman starts crying on your shoulder.

The icky part was knowing I was in the presence of a woman so crazy that she thought her highest calling was to incubate encapsulated alien teratomas until they came squirting out of her body and walked around on their own legs. I have heard of some bizarre vocations in my life, but seldom anything quite so disgusting.

In his house," intoned the congregation, "He shall return, that dead lies dreaming.