Tom Holt Quotes

If you hadn't noticed, I'm the pub loony around here. This is my turf, and if there's any gibbering to be done, I'm the one who does it. If you want to gibber, find another bar.

'Doesn't worry me,' Jane replied, I'm an accountant.

You twist everything," he said.
"Guilty," I said. "Though I prefer to think of it as a form of art.

Treasure maps; Czarist bonds; a case of stuffed dodos; Scarlett O'Hara's birth certificate; two flattened and deformed silver bullet heads in an old matchbox; Baedeker's guide to Atlantis (seventeenth edition, 1902); the autograph score of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, with Das Ende written neatly at the foot of the last page; three boxes of moon rocks; a dumpy, heavy statuette of a bird covered in dull black paint, which reminded him of something but he couldn't remember what; a Norwich Union life policy in the name of Vlad Dracul; a cigar box full of oddly shaped teeth, with CAUTION: DO NOT DROP painted on the lid in hysterical capitals; five or six doll's-house-sized books with titles like Lilliput On $2 A Day; a small slab of green crystal that glowed when he opened the envelope; a thick bundle of love letters bound in blue ribbon, all signed Margaret Roberts; a left-luggage token from North Central railway terminus, Ruritania; Bartholomew's Road Atlas of Oz (one page, with a yellow line smack down the middle); a brown paper bag of solid gold jelly babies; several contracts for the sale and purchase of souls; a fat brown envelope inscribed To Be Opened On My Death: E. A. Presley, unopened; Oxford and Cambridge Board O-level papers in Elvish language and literature, 1969-85; a very old drum in a worm-eaten sea-chest marked F. Drake, Plymouth, in with a load of minute-books and annual accounts of the Winchester Round Table; half a dozen incredibly ugly portraits of major Hollywood film stars; Unicorn-Calling, For Pleasure & Profit by J. R. Hartley; a huge collection of betting slips, on races to be held in the year 2019; all water, as far as Paul was concerned, off a duck's {back]"

Luck, like a Russian car, generally only works if you push it.

Like, there's these new fundamentalist religious fanatics, some name like Meek Militant Action. Their aim's to inherit the Earth, provided nobody objects.' - c. 12

Here we go, surfing the Net again, something done by humans and very gullible fish.

Between the town of Giles, to the north of the Tomkinson Range, and Forrest in the Nullarbor Plain, lies the Great Victorian Desert. It is hot, arid, desolate and merciless; and whatever the Creator had in mind when He made it that way, it most certainly wasn't human beings.
It's a really awful place to be if you've got toothache.

On the way out, I reflected on the way in which so many mortals pray. It’s strictly a rational proposition. If He exists, they argue, it’s best to be on the right side of Him; if He doesn’t, well, no harm done, it hasn’t cost anything. I’m not like that, unfortunately. Either I believe or I don’t. And I believed—thought I believed—in the doctrines of Saloninus concerning the invalidity of conventional morality. I believed that there are no absolutes of good and evil and that all that matters, in the final analysis, is which side you’re on. It was, I felt, a doctrine which accorded exactly with my own observations and experience.
The problems start when your side isn’t on your side anymore.

There is no word for artist in the Mysian language; instead there’s a long-winded periphrasis that translates as man-who-deceives-others-into-giving-food-by-spoiling-bits-of-wood.

The great thing about not necessarily believing in your beliefs is that it’s so much easier to revise them.

That’s bureaucracy for you. Never follow a straight line when a spiral will get you there eventually.

Why get so worked up about a nonexistent threat? Answer: someone somewhere is covering something up.

You’re not supposed to be always on the doorstep clamouring for instructions. Use your discretion and your initiative, they say, that’s why you’re the grade you are. And then, when it all goes wrong, it’s all your fault. What on Earth possessed you to do all that without checking back first? How could you have been so stupid?

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