Too Like The Lightning Quotes
"Humanity cannot live without these questions! Let us create a new creature! Not a preacher, but a teacher, who hears a parishioner’s questions and presents the answers of all the faiths and sects of history."
"I have no truth to offer but what I believe. You have no obligation to believe with me, and can dismiss your flawed guide, and Bridger with me, at the journey’s end."
"People have made a lot of different suggestions, and there are good arguments for many different versions."
"I’m not afraid to explore this, not by pushing anyone to do anything, but with hypotheticals, thought experiments, listening and talking."
"I believe the project was ordered by the previous head of the Japanese voting bloc, but your predecessor’s guilt doesn’t make you guilty."
"You must at least have asked where he was taken to be raised? What Hive he joined?"
"I saw gendered costume on the stage, in art, pornography, but to see it in real life is unbearably different."
"Yet somehow the idea warms me, that, out of every thousand lives of suffering my ancient counterparts endured, one slave was building something that his soul, if it could view all from outside of time, might call Great."
"You’re alive today for a reason, Mycroft, and it isn’t shoveling shit."
"Do you really think you can work with me fairly?"
"I think I can if you help me. You can clear a lot of the propaganda."
"We have to. In the name of science, reason, all humanity."
"Moral calculus like that will drive you crazy."
"If you can’t ask anything without it being a question someone asked in anger some time."
"The potential is too great, the immediate, human applications if we can understand this power."
"You will?" The promise washed the tension from me, like a welcome summer rain.
"The clever insult in his Latin understatement cheered me enough to smile."
"But what I need now is for you to focus and tell me what you know about this Gyges Device."
"I believe the device was produced in secret but funded and authorized by someone within the Japanese Mitsubishi leadership."
"Chief Director Andō ordered me to try to track down the thieves from thirteen years ago."
"Give yourself a day to breathe, and work tomorrow."
"Mycroft, we hear a certain thoughtless soul dragged you away from the Marseilles spill this morning before you received your breakfast. France owes you a meal; attend my party tonight."
"And it will be good to glimpse the lights of our age one last time, before they fade like starlight as the sun glare of an elder era dawns once more."
"You may object that you know the festival already, but have you ever really seen the speeches live in person?"
"If Bridger had brought Pointer back on the theory that it’s always better to be alive than dead, then what about the other plastic corpses lost somewhere in the trench dust?"
"I am no sensayer. In Carlyle’s place I would have just said that death is bad, and that of course he should bring Pointer back."
"It’s not unusual for us to spend a week in the office without sleeping, most of us hardly see our bash’es, and I don’t know a one person there who manages to spend their whole salary, since we don’t really do anything but work."
"If history is written by winners, fiction like that is written by bystanders trying to guess what the victims would have said if they’d survived."
"I get mad at authors for doing that sort of thing to characters."
"Books, even made-up stories, can’t all have happy endings because they reflect the real world, and the real world isn’t always happy."
"Most of the characters in that story were willing to die for what they believed in."
"That’s the sort of thing you can talk to the sensayer Carlyle about."
"I don’t know if Odysseus could get used to dealing with armies that have guns, or with people who believe in one God instead of lots of gods."
"You know it’s very hard for people to deal with a world completely different from their own."
"Anger doesn’t help. Men write books like that because they want history to remember, mourn, and make sure that sort of tragedy won’t happen again."
"I know doctors keep telling me I have another fifty years left in me, but after seventy-two years as a journalist voker I decided it was time to pay more attention to family."
"Thisbe: "
"Ockham: "
"Eureka: "
"Cato: <¿Should I take them out? I have clear shots on all twelve.>"
"Ockham: "
"Cato: "
"Ockham: "
"Cato: "
"Eureka: "
"Sniper: "
"Ockham: "
"I hope so. We're supposed to follow up with Dominic Seneschal about some urgent work, but we can't seem to find them anywhere."
"It is liberty’s pride that puts the swagger in Chagatai’s steps, not bloodthirst."
"He looked at me and said: ‘Observe, Chagatai, the protagonist of every work of fiction is Humanity, and the antagonist is God.’"
"You must not think they rape and murder daily."
"The Major says he didn’t see a weapon, but I cannot believe so wise and wild-spawned a Blacklaw would open a door without some blade or pistol hidden in an off hand."
"My mind inventoried what else the backpack must contain: hair, fingerprints."
"‘Mycroft,’ ‘Mycroft,’ never the dreaded surname, not in front of this good innocent."
"Bridger’s voice rose behind me, as soft and sweet and threatening as I had ever heard it."
"Sorry, yes. I know they have too many nicknames."
"People have done much worse things in the past, but that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore. We were supposed to be past that."
"That’s it exactly. They call it Thisbe’s Rinse."
"‘They’ve already crossed a lot of lines,’ Carlyle pushed."
"Sexual desire is the purest and most natural of animal drives. To suppress it in favor of an intellectual and theological satisfaction is a perversion of nature in the most extreme sense."
"Celibacy is the most extreme of sexual perversions, after all."
"I was a very wicked child, proud, self-involved, and filled with the most perfidious jealousies."
"I grew up in this house, not among the common children but one of the elect, raised in the strictest discipline and with the care of many wise and generous tutors."
"I tried to drive this love from my rebellious bosom, and that battle claimed my happiness and health, for I soon succumbed to a wasting sickness which consigned me to my bed, and very nearly to my grave."
"I have consecrated my virginity to mon Seigneur Jehovah, and dedicate my hours to the contemplation of His divine Mysteries and the exercise of Good Works in His holy Name."
"It is a refuge from the barbarities of the modern day. Our members come here to escape for a few hours to a more courteous and enlightened age, and return to the outside world refreshed by a taste of civilized society."
"Patronage is everything here. When in trouble, invoke the highest ranking person you’re associated with."
"You mustn’t let clients see you like that in the halls, Mycroft."
"Late in life Voltaire built a small church on their estate. They put an inscription over the entrance, Deo Erexit Voltaire: built for God by Voltaire."
"Never allow yourself to be taken to a room where there is not at least one fully clothed woman."
"The sensayer had crossed Jehovah’s threshold; Carlyle, like Voltaire, will not trade knowledge for ignorance, not for all the happiness in the world."
"I am Jehovah’s mother, yes," Madame answered.
"Imagine how many lives we could save if every police officer in the world were armed so gently."
"The urge to break the religious taboo is common enough, and it’s better that it be concentrated here, where it’s carefully monitored and directed toward harmless play."
"I prefer exerting this kind of power. I could have the other, but I don’t want to."
"It’s like a language. A young invented language with a couple thousand words might manage baby books and street directions, but Voltaire, Shakespeare, the profound peaks and doggerel troughs of literature, those take a million words."
"That’s the child, no doubt," Andō answered gravely.
"The death instinct, the willingness to kill, it’s still in us, the death instinct, the willingness to kill, it’s still in us."
"I’m the one who’s going to finish it. Finish everything! Everything we started!"
"Stop this, Tully. Canner’s right, the book’s not yours."
"You can’t let people associate Utopia with Tully’s message."
"I’ve found Him. Not the True God, I mean This Universe’s God."
"I’ve abandoned Him… cut Him off from me… sight… sound… word…"
"Dominic, what have you done? What heat! Ah! Fuck!"
"It’s inevitable we’ll get in one another’s way from time to time."
"Mycroft, thou must have a hat so thou mayest remove it in the presence of thy betters!"