Top 15 Charles Stross Quotes

Apocalypses are easier slept through than experienced.

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

We’re enveloped by a cortege of motorcycle outriders and blacked-out SUVs so ostentatious that Her Majesty would die of embarrassment if they tried it on her back home. We are so visible I have to fight the urge to crouch down in my seat—but then I realize here in DC your importance is telegraphed by the size of the gridlock in your wake.

American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor—that, and the army is less trigger-happy.

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.

Anxiety loves company almost as much as misery.

“Yes-yes!” Jon bounces up and down on the balls of her feet.
“How much coffee did we have this morning?” Pete asks, suspicion dawning.
“All of it!”
Brains absorbs this fact slowly. The room he and Pete shared didn’t come with a filter machine, but there was an industrial-sized one in the motel lobby. If Jon drank the entire jug—
“How many times did you refill it?” asks Pete.
“Only three times! It kept running out!”
Brains glances at the vicar. “Are we going to need a tranquilizer dart?” he murmurs.

His Infernal Majesty leans towards me confidingly. “You have imposter syndrome,” He says, “but paradoxically, that’s often a sign of competence. Only people who understand their work well enough to be intimidated by it can be terrified by their own ignorance. It’s the opposite of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, where the miserably incompetent think they’re on top of the job because they don’t understand it.”

History is written by the survivors, a narrative they compose to explain events to themselves. So the historicity of journals like this one—their accuracy and authenticity—is a function of the reliability of the narrator.

Contingency time is useless wasted time, right until you need it.

He’s had a lot of practice helping families suffering from experiences that are simultaneously mundane and far more horrifying than anything in a movie: deaths from cancer and dementia, the loss of babies and young children, that sort of thing.

The Republic of Mhari contains five thousand times more cells than there are humans on earth, but is somehow both more and less than the sum of her parts. If all those cells die, then I am, by definition, dead. But the relationship between cell-citizens and the Republic of Me is less obvious than you might think.
At any point in time some of my cells are dying and being replaced, and the me that exist today consists almost entirely of different cells from the me of a couple of years ago—although I’m still me. But if you were to separate all my cells and then keep them alive in a mad scientist’s test-tube collection, I’d be dead, though all my bits live on. The Republic of Self can be dissolved, or taken over in a coup, or drastically reformed. I harbor this illusion of unitary identity—but in reality I’m what biologists call a superorganism, a swarm, and ensemble entity. I am not me: I am Hobbes’s Leviathan, or Leviathan’s Representative.

I’ve never been so frightened for somebody in my life: I felt totally powerless. You can’t punch extradimensional parasites out of your boyfriend’s brain.

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.

Story of my life. I wasted nearly a decade before I realized that life is not a game and there are no save points or second chances.