228 Quotes by Nick Harkaway

Hah! Both. Good girl. I’m Chase. It’s from the French word for “chair.” Evidently at some point after we left the old home continent for Marseilles my family made its living from the cutting and shaping of wood into uncomfortable furniture. I know it was uncomfortable because I’ve sat on it: awkward in all the wrong places. I like to introduce myself that way, it lets people know what they’re in for.

Edie Banister, wearing a false moustache which tastes of tiger flank and erotic dancer, sitting six storeys up on the windowsill of the aged mother of a renownedly murderous prince, takes a few seconds to contemplate the unusual direction of her life.

Inoue was standing at the point of a spear composed of irate Japanese geeks, and he was pleased to see that the principal reaction on her face was a fizzing, imperious outrage.

The human condition is most accurately chronicled in pulp, I think. The ugly and ordinary lusts, the contradictory drives, are all ignored by more self-consciously poetic writers striving to peel away the dross to reveal the inner person who of course exists only as the sum of the dross.

What is the difference between a person and a book? We can know the truth of neither. Both are encoded things seeking to make themselves clear.

Dressing, I chose the second shirt, the one softened in the mouth of a trained and perfumed albino hippopotamus and made entirely of pigeon’s wool, because it goes better with the shoes than the one stitched with baby hair.

Joe is never sure whether they’re mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.

That power may counterfeit the action of justice in most cases, but justice incomplete is not justice, it is the anticipation of wrong.

Real life has no understanding of proper structure,” the boy said, “which is why news stories are always made of little lies.