First Among Sequels Quotes
"Instead of drifting from one crisis to the next and appeasing the nation with a steady stream of knee-jerk legislation and headline-grabbing but arguably pointless initiatives, they had been resolutely building a raft of considered long-term plans that concentrated on unity, fairness and tolerance."
"There are a lot of idiots in this country, and they deserve representation as much as the next man."
"I wish I had a better way to describe it, but I’m not a poet."
"Violence never solved anything. Okay, sometimes it solves things—but not for him, at least not yet."
"It’s a surplus of stupidity we have, not stereotypical dreariness."
"Books just don’t light anyone’s candle these days."
"You can lose yourself in a book, but you find yourself in Poetry."
"It’s not important that you are—your role in Jurisfiction is only to defend the status."
"I don’t compromise. I base my decisions on what is best for the BookWorld."
"The beauty of the whole process was that the reader in the Outland never suspected there was any sort of process at all—the act of reading was to most people, myself included, as natural as breathing."
"The thing is, I don’t generally toe the line, and Jobsworth doesn’t like that."
"The first thing I noticed as we arrived was that the chief protagonist’s feet were on fire."
"Books suffer wear and tear, just the same as hip joints, cars and reputations."
"The hard part is trying to explain that there actually is a highest number, a fact that tends to throw all work regarding infinite sets into a flat spin."
"I actually quite liked her, but there was a huge quantity of work to be done before she might be considered Jurisfiction material."
"Time was the glue of the cosmos and had to be eased apart—push destiny too hard and it had an annoying habit of pushing back."
"Time is odd, very odd. It's odder than almost anything you can think of."
"If it weren't for time, everything would happen at the same instant and existence would become tiresomely frenetic and be over very quickly."
"The moment you arrived was precisely the time you left."
"The force that pushes the fabric of time along is the past attempting to catch up with the future in order to reach an equilibrium."
"The actual present is in what you regard as the far-distant future."
"Everything that makes up what you call the present is in reality the long distant past."
"The controversial Milk Levy from which the unpopular Cheese Duty is derived was imposed in 1970."
"The nation’s stupidity surplus could be discharged safely."
"The fall in revenue of our publishing arm has been dramatic."
"The Piano Squad has been on the go for eight hours straight."
"Despite losing nearly everything, the vast multinational had staged an impressive comeback."
"Time travel was like that—full of impossible paradoxes that defied explanation."
"The Austen Rover is the most advanced piece of transfictional technology in the world!"
"The only thing you share with me is a name and a face."
"If someone dies during an assignment, then the assignment was a failure. No exceptions."
"The first draft had been torn apart by wolves and then stuck back together at random before publication."
"Diplomacy and using your head are better than waving a gun around."
"The classics are too slow for me. Not enough action."
"Listen, sister, you may be a big cheese at Jurisfiction today, but if I were you, I’d show a keen sense of diplomacy."
"Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit."
"I won’t say it’s been a pleasure, because it hasn’t."
"Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work."
"If we convince ourselves that something is possible, it becomes so."
"The Short Now will spell the gradual collapse of forward planning, and mankind will slowly strangulate itself in a downward spiral of uncaring self-interest and short-term instant gratification."
"I don’t think any authors would regard their writing process as creative totalitarianism."
"With you trapped here, we have everything I want."
"If you go expecting it to be a crock of shit, it’s that, too."
"Enjoy your imprisonment. You’ll know what it was like for my husband."
"Panic was the mind killer, and I still had several hours to figure this out."
"Something about this place was undeniably creepy, but I couldn’t put my finger on it."
"I covered my face with my hands and groaned. Anne Wirthlass-Schitt and her obnoxious husband had not been kidding when they said they’d chosen this place especially for me."
"But she needs the medicine now," pleaded Mr. Langdon. "If she doesn’t get it, she will die."
"I place Mrs. Langdon’s definite death above the possibility of your penury, Dr. Glister."
"I won’t hide from the men I’ve condemned to death."
"The only way to win the game is not to play."
"We’ve been eaten, blown up, and suffered fatal illnesses. The drownings are the worst."
"We’re oral tradition, but we’re not in a story—we’re an ethics seminar."
"I thought it was going to be one serious mother of a debrief."
"If I take myself out of the equation, you are free to sail across the sea unhampered, unimpeded—and safe."
"You never come out on top, no matter what."
"This is too heavy for me," said the cabbie.
"We have all been drowned over a thousand times each."
"The whole point of the poem is lost—Henry will be furious."
"The annoying thing was, she’d done it all for nothing."
"I have to do terrible things in order to save others, and I’m not sure I could even do it."
"If you want to be a SpecOp, act kinda weird."
"My father had a face that could stop a clock."
"We learned from his subsequent visits that he regarded the whole service as 'morally and historically corrupt'."
"I think my biorhythms must be out of whack."
"Special... Temporal... Stability. Got it!"
"The Read-O-Meter had been steadily clicking upward as ReadRates once again began to rise."
"They'd tried to kill me twice already, and who was to say they wouldn't try again?"
"There was a serial killer loose in the BookWorld."
"How hard can it be to get a parachute around here?!"
"It's Thursday, and I think we've got a situation...."