The October Man Quotes
"In late September, as the nights close in, a strange madness possesses my father."
"This may be because my father is the city’s Polizeipräsident but it’s also because he cooks a mean steak and is generous with the beer."
"Spiritually my father is a big, jolly, red-faced man who grew up on a farm in Lower Saxony."
"Policing is a noble profession, Tobi," he said. "But it’s still just a job, and you’re supposed to come home at the end of the shift to the important stuff."
"Family," said Papa. "Friends. The house, the hearth—the dog."
"Police work," said Stefan, "is ninety per cent paperwork, nine per cent bullshit and one per cent horror."
"The wrong case isn’t about danger... Where the job becomes an obsession and the next thing you know it’s hello bottle and goodbye family."
"Cowboys and unicorns, I thought as the beer carried me away to sleep."
"I decided to be a policeman like my father before me."
"It’s like she was shining a light straight into me," said Frau Stracker. "She said, ‘Tell your grandfather thank you for the wine. But the compact was broken the day they killed my mother. It is a new age and the old ways have gone.’"
"Those days are past," she said. "That’s what the goddess said. And viniculture has progressed."
"Too much risk that other countries will know we kept it."
"This is all forbidden knowledge that was not supposed to be kept."
"We're like birds that have forgotten how to fly."
"You can live with the violence, the squalor, and the stupidity—it's the waste of people's futures that really grinds you down."
"Know when to speak, when to listen and, most importantly, when to call for backup."
"A wise person knows when to act and when not to act."
"The older romantics of the White Library in Cologne had talked about the transformative power of magic and how it interacted with nature to create wonders."
"You don’t want to shoot somebody’s cat by accident."
"You can’t let fear drive you," she says. "But you can’t let it paralyze you either. You must know when to take decisive action, even when it seems extreme, to prevent future harm."
"A despair will suck you in, but a malignancy is coming to get you."
"Magic could do such things, according to Dr. Hugo Braun, whom the Director rates as the most reliable of the Weimar practitioners."
"We don’t actually know what magic is, but we do know some of the things it does. It’s like Isaac Newton and gravity."
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it."
"And then what? We keep files on them? Or why not make it simple and require them to carry papers or perhaps sew a symbol onto their coats. A scarlet pentagram perhaps. Would that satisfy you?"
"We have an unregulated practitioner on our hands."
"They got a new identity and pension," I said—at least that’s what the Director told me happened, and she really had no reason to lie.
"Are there any practitioners currently in my area?" asked Ralph Förstner.
"Not that we know of," I said. "It was the first thing we checked."
"The glamour is not an easy technique," I said.
"You’d better get on with it, then," said Förstner.
"And there were vestigia at the threshold, so I left one of the intervention team on guard with instructions not to let anyone in."
"This is definitely where it happened," I said.
"He killed my Christian," she said. "This was not a good man."
"Only the Director can do that, and she’s not allowed to either."
"I once got into quite a serious fight with a Lutheran pastor over this issue, so I’ve learned to be cautious."
"I'm not sure," she said. "I don’t think I’ve had it since I left home."
"I deliberately took a large bite so that all I could do was make a vague non-committal sound."
"You think that this revenant has possessed—" she said. "Sequestrated a member of the Good Wine Drinking Association?"
"In a classical wizards’ duel you’re supposed to respond by guessing what the spell is and casting a counter-spell or riposte."