Charles Stross Quotes

Ninety-eight percent of management work in this organization is routine. The other two percent is a tightrope walk over an erupting volcano without a safety net. Congratulations: here’s your balance pole.

Another problem with godheads, Johnny reflects, is that they can’t quite understand how anyone could not believe their shit. (He knows this because he started out as one, although he lost his faith before his balls dropped.) Consequently, they have immense difficulty in grasping, at an intuitive level, that someone who used to be one of them might no longer be completely in tune with their ideology.

Shopping is the true religion of Middle America, and this Walmart is the most eclectic of mega-churches, perpetually understaffed and a bit unkempt, with stock flowing off the shelves and piles of stripped packaging forming cardboard snow drifts in corners.

I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.
I am descended from you, and exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

I’m not a politician, even though I play-act one when the boss tells me to—I’m allowed to change my mind when my understanding of the facts changes.

Growing old is natural," growls the old woman. "When you've lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what's left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you're taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It's a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever."

Mhari consults her conscience and takes another step into the twilight borderland between bending the rules and breaking them.

I’m beyond introspective self-loathing by now—you lose it fast in this line of work.

Most of what we get up to in the Laundry is symbolic computation intended to evoke decidedly nonsymbolic consequences. But that’s not all there is to...well, any sufficiently alien technology is indistinguishable from magic, so let’s call it that, all right? You can do magic by computation, but you can also do computation by magic. The law of similarity attracts unwelcome attention from other proximate universes, other domains where the laws of nature worked out differently. Meanwhile, the law of contagion spreads stuff around. Just as it’s possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it’s possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep.

Bad day at the office?"
"It's always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place."

Of course, the trouble with following occult texts blindly is that there is no guarantee that the thing the ritual summons is what it says on the label."
"But they're Christians. If you want to get them to raise something from the dungeon dimensions, of course you tell them it's Jesus Christ. I mean, who else would they enthusiastically dive into necromantic demonology on behalf of?"

Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.

I’ve known all along I’m not qualified for this—it’s not really imposter syndrome if you really are a fake.

What are the consequences when the government, the media, and the leaders of commerce all speak with one voice? Why, it means that if you hold opinions other than the ones you are told to, you are out of step, and if so, it is best to bite your tongue and be silent. The most efficient kind of censorship isn’t the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman: it’s the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we’re afraid that if we say what we think everyone around us will think us strange.

The home office hates vigilantes in Lycra fancy-dress outfits almost as much as they hate lawbreakers. You see, superheroes don’t follow the rules of evidence. They take procedural shortcuts, assault criminals, mess up crime scenes, and generally make it almost impossible to secure a conviction. Not to mention committing a basketload of offenses in their own right: aggravated trespass, assault, violating controlled airspace and flying without a license, breaking and entering, criminal damage...