364 Quotes by Charles Stross

There’s always some idiot who thinks that after the revolution they’ll be the one sitting on top of the hill of corpses, dining on caviar served out of a bowl made of a chromed baby’s skull.

Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, “if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?”

Cat. No doubled vision: it’s a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right.

I don’t have a license to kill, but I don’t have orders not to kill in the course of my duties, either. Which realization I find extremely disturbing;.

The PM smiles, and for a moment I see a flickering vision where His face should be: an onion-skin Matryoshka doll of circular shark-toothed maws, lizard-man faces, and insectile hunger. “A word in my study if you don’t mind. Right this way.

And now my blood ran cold. Because if there’s one thing worse than an IT manager who’s feeling the chill wind of obsolescence blowing down his neck and consequently trying to contribute code to the repository like an actual working developer, it’s an IT manager who’s getting creative.

There is cold comfort to be drawn from the sure and certain knowledge that the correct way to deal with the problem you’re facing in your job involves napalm, if you find yourself confronting a dragon and you aren’t even carrying a cigarette lighter.

So once again Janice proves that not only is she a nerd, she’s a useful nerd who gets to stay on the team.

It’s the kind of outfit one wears in the hope of meeting someone who’ll help you out of it.