The Fuller Memorandum Quotes
"Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos—in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever—was infinitely more comforting than the truth."
"Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake."
"Magic being a branch of pure mathematics, and computers being machines that can be used to perform lots of mathematical tasks very fast, it follows that most real practicing magicians start out as computer science graduates."
"I’m not going to try to second-guess the Incident Committee, but it sounds to me like a straightforward mistake made by an overworked employee who hadn’t been fully briefed and was in a hurry to get back to his other duties."
"Fatal accidents never have just a single cause, they happen at the end of a whole series of errors."
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager."
"Good management is a bit like oxygen—it’s invisible and you don’t notice its presence until it’s gone, and then you’re sorry."
"I’m not a team player, I don’t suffer fools gladly, and I don’t like petty office politics."
"I don’t know where in hell they found her, but as managers go she’s all I can ask for."
"We human beings live at the bottom of a thin puddle of oxygen-nitrogen vapor adhering to the surface of a medium-sized rocky planet."
"Would you want to have children, if you knew for a fact that in a couple of years you might have to cut their throats for their own good?"
"CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is the code name for the end of the world."
"Survival is far from assured—it may not even be likely. But one thing’s for sure: we’re going to give it our best shot."
"Let’s consider life as a box of chocolates. All of them are unique."
"The map is one with the territory; think too hard about the wrong theorems and you shouldn’t be surprised if extradimensional entities start chewing microscopic chunks out of your gray matter."
"If the acceleration is real, we’ve only got a few months left."
"Ought to make the best use of what time we’ve got left."
"Outside the window, the wild darkness claws at our frail bubble of light and warmth, ignored and temporarily forgotten in our primate frenzy. But its time will come."
"My waistline disagrees, but my stomach says ‘fuck it.’"
"Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of −5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card."
"No such thing as a 'license to kill.' Nor do secret agents routinely carry firearms for self-defense."
"You don’t need a Glock to get rid of lodgers, my son."
"We could, you know. There’s still time. If you want."
"No, the world we work in isn’t a suitable one to inflict on a child you love."
"Welcome to the monkey house, and have a banana."
"You can ignore history—but history won’t necessarily ignore you."
"Chaos is unstable; entropy is magic’s great enemy."
"The Russians are no longer dragged backwards by the invisible hand of Lenin."
"There’s a pragmatic and pugnacious attitude to their overseas operations these days."
"You can shut that," he tells her. "If you want."
"Not given the magnitude of the threat we face. Desperate measures are called for; I merely believe this one to be too desperate."
"All this Russian stuff is confusing the hell out of me—why can’t we go back to worrying about Al Qaida or pedophiles on the internet or whatever it is that intelligence services traditionally obsess about?"
"It wasn’t until HyperCard showed up on the Apple Mac in 1987 that anything like it reached the general public."
"I’ve met gibbering horrors from other universes, been psychically entangled with a serial killer fish goddess, stalked by zombies, imprisoned by a megalomaniac billionaire, and I’ve even survived the attention of the Auditors."
"If you thought you could shake me down for useful information, I’m afraid you picked the wrong spy."
"It would be in everyone’s best interests for the teapot to return to its rightful office."
"Teapot did not steal the Buddha’s treasures, else I would have hanged him as high as any other wretch; but he idly looked through the library, and I fear what he did may turn out for the worse in the long run."
"He always does what I ask of him, which is a blessing, and if there is one man I would trust to stand guard on a treasure-house for me, it is he."
"I shall make indirect enquiries to see if it is possible to acquire Roman Von Ungern Sternberg’s boyhood fossil collection for the nation."
"I’ve got a feeling that all the pieces of the jigsaw are within my grasp, if only I could figure out where they lie—probably dragged under the sofa by an invisible cat, knowing my luck."
"The default package usually comes with a priest, and when they start driveling on about how Uncle Fred (who died aged sixty-two of a hideous brain tumor) is safe in the ever-loving arms of Jesus, the effect it has on me is not to make me love my creator: it’s to wish I could punch him in the face repeatedly."
"We humans are incredibly fine-tuned by evolution for the task of spotting coincidences and causal connections. It’s a very useful talent that dates back to the bad old days on the savannah."
"My idea of a comforting belief system is your default English atheism . . . except that I know too much."
"Being predisposed to religion has its uses, but it’s a real Achilles’ heel if your civilization is under threat by vastly powerful alien horrors."
"We’d picked up a squad of UIM specialists and a police anti-terrorism group who prepared to seal off the area. Trouble is, it was mid-afternoon and the neighborhood was busy; the last thing you want to do is to run an anti-terrorism exercise next door to a nursery school when the parents are coming to pick their kids up."
"I generally try to avoid funerals: they make me angry. I know the purpose of a funeral is to provide comfort and a sense of closure for the bereaved; and I agree, in principle, that this is generally a good thing."
"You’ll keep it to yourself because while the cat’s away the mice may play, and one of this particular bunch of mice appears to be a security leak, and I’m setting a trap for them. You’re the bait, by the way."
"It understands what makes us tick, shares—thanks to years of compulsion and indoctrination—our goals, and it has an eerie judgement of character, too—I believe it may be of significant use to the Doublecross committee in rooting out enemy spies."
"No. Intimidation is when you’re boxed by a Thirteenth Directorate officer and two Spetsnaz thugs he borrowed from the embassy."
"The Teapot is missing, he told me: You’d better find it before the wrong people get their hands on it and use it to make tea."
"I don’t function well in the small hours of the morning."
"If this is a telesales call, I’ll plead justifiable homicide."
"Like I said: fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake."
"I sleep like a log, and I have difficulty pulling my wits about me if something wakes me in the pre-dawn dark."
"This line isn’t secure, so save your questions."
"I’m confused," I finally say. "I thought this was an enquiry about the break-in and theft from my office safe, but you’ve been asking questions about Angleton and Mo instead. What’s going on?"
"It is not in the remit of this committee to answer questions," says the Chief Auditor, a trifle archly.
"Sometimes Mo works in the New Annexe; and sometimes she doesn’t."
"In the name of national security, I command and require you to forget me," she says, slipping the card away and turning towards the alley.
"Yes, I want all the paper clips and staples in that desk." Her cheek quirks.
"Light as thistledown and dry as a dead man’s tongue I walk through the door."
"The civilian FATACC incident when you were out at Cosford has been upgraded."
"Everything’s fallen apart at the very worst time, and it’s all my fault."
"There is a philosophy by which many people live their lives, and it is this: life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you’ve got, the less shit you have to eat."
"I may believe in mind-eating horrors from beyond spacetime, but they’ll have to break my neck before I bend it to their yoke."
"We aren’t alone in this cosmos; we aren’t even alone on this planet."
"Magic, the stuff I deal with in the office on a day-to-day basis, involves the indirect manipulation of information flow through these unseen dimensions, and communication with the extra-dimensional entities that live elsewhere."
"I’m dreaming. I’m looking out across a wasteland of rolling ground, gray and crumbly as lunar regolith, beneath a starry sky."
"We’re just going to drink your blood and eat a teeny-tiny bit of your flesh, silly."