Tom Holt Quotes

In fact, as they will be delighted to tell you, Taunton is no longer a one-horse town these days,they have a bicycle as well.

That's it?' Boamund said.
'Basically, yes,' the hermit replied. 'I've left out Helmut von Moltke and the Peace of Nikolsburg, and maybe I skated over the Benelux customs union a bit, but I think you've got the essentials there. Anything you're not sure about, you can look up in the book.' - c. 1

Take anything to its logical conclusion and you’re likely to end up with the grotesque and the absurd.

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.

No, no,' said Hildy, 'I dig up ancient things buried in the earth. Things that belonged to people who lived hundreds of years ago. As she said this, she began to feel uncomfortable. She had forgotten about the brooch.</br>'Do you really?' said the King. 'We used to call that grave-robbing.

It was irritating to have one's physical shortcomings pointed out quite so plainly twice in one evening, once by a beautiful girl and once by a dying badger.

Jason squared his shoulders, drew the Sword of - I couldn't give a toss what it's supposed to be called, he said to himself, I shall call it Freckles - and took one step forward.

Here and there a doorway or low arch concealed the occasional mugger, rapist or lawyer.

Good guys is just a fancy way of saying Us. Bad guys is only ever Them.' -

...and we have already seen how insurance is like a pyramid - (Huge, incomprehensible, hideously expensive, completely unnecessary and specifically designed only to be of benefit to you once you're dead?)

I started from the premise, which sort of came with the brief, that priests and religion are full of shit; from there it followed naturally that the morality they espouse must be false or faulty. Having established the side I was on, I looked around for arguments to support it. I found they came quite easily to me. I started with various inconsistencies in religious doctrine, and found that they derived from compromises made by long-ago ecumenical councils to reconcile violent political disputes within the clerical hierarchy. I argued, if the priests make up bits of doctrine to suit themselves, maybe they made up the whole thing. From there it was no big deal to demonstrate that they’d done exactly that. The Book as we know it proved to be not a monolithic and unambiguous record of the word of the Invincible Sun, but rather a negotiated construct, patched together from four or five sources, revised and edited and redacted by generations of scholars, some of whom belonged to such and such a sect or interest group, others of whom supported diametrically opposite positions or interests. It was no bother at all to show that the Book was a political object with no real credibility. And once you’ve knocked out the Book, you’ve dealt religion a blow from which it can never recover.

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

But the unforeseen consequences—"
"What consequences?"
"I don't know, I can't foresee them.

In the beginning was the Word. Nobody knows what it actually was, although it would be nice to think that it was 'Sorry.

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