228 Quotes by Nick Harkaway

And don’t tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn’t. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That’s what we live with.

I thought about my personal version of heaven, which is small and calm and features only one angel, who cannot sing.

That’s what you get for ignoring the beauty of Tupperware.

Photography is without mercy – though it’s nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat’s meat men.

Law is error, you see. It’s an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

Google says young people don’t care about privacy, but when asked if they’d let their parents see their phone bills and other stuff they say no.

In the brush at the bottom of Master Wu’s garden, something snuffles. I do not know whether ninjas snuffle. It seems to me that a very subtle sort of ninja might snuffle so as to make you think he was a neighbourhood dog, or just to let you know he was there and yet leave you guessing. On the other hand, maybe a ninja would regard this kind of trick as amateurish.

Joshua Joseph has no great hatred of modern technology – he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine.

It’s usually best not to ask philosophers anything, precisely because they have the habit of what in the Persian language is called sanud: the profitless consideration of unsettling yet inconsequential things.