Top 200 Charles Stross Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “All right.” Panin sips at his wine. “Excuse me, but – there is a personal connection?” “What?” “You appear unduly upset... ” “Yes.” She looks at her hands. “The missing officer is my husband.” Panin puts his glass down and leans back, very slowly, with the extreme self-control of a man who has just realized he is sharing a table with a large, ticking bomb. “Is there anything I can do to help?” “Yes.”

— Charles Stross

202. “And convincing someone that an outrageous ritual has caused them to forget the constitutional bedrock of their society is hard.”

— Charles Stross

203. “He shrugs, an aw-shucks gesture quite at odds with the rest of his mannerisms, and produces a grin from wherever he keeps his spare faces when he isn’t wearing them.”

— Charles Stross

204. “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence or overwork?”

— Charles Stross

205. “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line, dudes.”

— Charles Stross

206. “Apparently you’re only allowed to demolish Wolverhampton if you’re a property developer like Donald Trump. Crawling eldritch horrors don’t get planning permission unless they’re Trump’s hairpiece.”

— Charles Stross

207. “The most efficient kind of censorship isn’t the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman; it’s the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we’re afraid that if we say what we think everyone around us will think us strange.”

— Charles Stross

208. “The familiar rage was back, warming her from the inside out. It was the rage of a woman repeatedly ignored and overlooked, denied her due, mistaken for just another enjoyable mistake the morning after.”

— Charles Stross

209. “But the relief he gains from feeding does nothing for the numb sense of grief that outlasts his hunger, and leaves him so fragile that he has to sit for half an hour before he is ready to unlock the door and switch off the DO NOT DISTURB sign.”

— Charles Stross

210. “Angleton is not to be trifled with. I don’t know anyone else currently alive and in the organization who could get away with misappropriating the name of the CIA’s legendary chief of counter-espionage as a nom de guerre. I don’t know anyone else in the organization whose face is visible in circa-1942 photographs of the Laundry’s line-up, either, barely changed across all those years.”

— Charles Stross

211. “Didn’t they know that the only unhackable computer is one that’s running a secure operating system, welded inside a steel safe, buried under a ton of concrete at the bottom of a coal mine guarded by the SAS and a couple of armoured divisions, and switched off? What did they think they were doing?”

— Charles Stross

212. “In his house,” intoned the congregation, “He shall return, that dead lies dreaming.”

— Charles Stross

213. “Within the shielded darkness of the President’s limousine a geas unlocks in my head, and I can finally remember the message the PM wants me to convey to his counterpart.”

— Charles Stross

214. “The empire of the Pharaohs was old before Rome was a twinkling in Odysseus’s eye, wise before China had been discovered, and over and done with before our founding fathers came down from Mount Olympus to give us the Bible and the US Constitution –.”

— Charles Stross

215. “Nor can I tell him – lest the SA’s command override cause my arterial blood vessels to burst and my eyeballs to catch fire – about Long-Term Continuity Operations and the Resistance.”

— Charles Stross

216. “Non-euclidian sofa.”

— Charles Stross

217. “Crawling eldritch horrors don’t get planning permission unless they’re Trump’s hairpiece.”

— Charles Stross

218. “Martian invasion: sure, the Army understands what it needs to do, if not necessarily how to go about it. Religious apocalypses involving the Four Horsemen: pass the holy water and bend over, here it comes again. But invasion by the armies of Middle Earth – who ordered that?”

— Charles Stross

219. “But I can’t be in three places at once!” “Tough,” says Mo, and that shell-like expression cracks into a grin. “You’re management now; isn’t it time you learned to delegate?”

— Charles Stross

220. “And if the common people ever realise that vampires exist, it will be a very short time indeed before naked noonday identity parades are required by law.”

— Charles Stross

221. “Collaring neds for breaking and entering is one thing, managing the gay community outreach program and training constables is another, but international cybercrime in a nuclear bunker under Drum Brae is right off the map.”

— Charles Stross

222. “You said a bad word!” Lyssa hammed it up, eyes wide and limpid, and cranked her tear ducts all the way from Flood Danger: Raise the Thames Barrier to Critical Emergency: Three Gorges Spillway Eroding.”

— Charles Stross

223. “Imp froze as he rounded the corner onto Regent Street, and saw four elven warriors shackling a Santa to a stainless-steel cross outside Hamleys Toy Shop.”

— Charles Stross

224. “It’s insane, but no more insane than Japan shutting down its entire nuclear reactor fleet in the middle of a heat wave because an extreme tsunami washed over one plant, or the USA invading a noninvolved Middle Eastern nation because a gang of crazies from somewhere else knocked down two skyscrapers. In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window. But sanity.”

— Charles Stross

225. “Organizations are not human beings and they don’t obey the same priorities. They’re hives. Like the bank you worked for, I suppose, but you were too specialized, working at too low a level to see the politics going on around you. Hives run on emergent consensus and policy.”

— Charles Stross

226. “She made herself uncomfortable behind the desk, erecting her laptop before her like a GM’s screen in a game of Cubicles and Corporations.”

— Charles Stross

227. “But what are we going to do with a load of guns?” asks Pete. “I don’t know, Brains, what are we going to do with a half-track full of guns?” Pinky asks. Brains chuckles. “Same thing we do every night, Pinky – ” “Fort up and wait for reinforcements,” Pinky says flatly.”

— Charles Stross

228. “Everything he’s learned about the Civil Service tells him that having tea poured for you is one of the ferociously guarded signifiers of rank, like the grade of paintings from the Government Art Collection hung on your office wall, or the quality of your carpet.”

— Charles Stross

229. “As the old saying had it, if you owe the bank ten thousand pounds, you have a problem; if you owe the bank ten million pounds, the bank has a problem; and if you owe the bank ten billion pounds, the Chancellor had a problem.”

— Charles Stross

230. “Better get accustomed to it, she told herself, mentally adding a note to her checklist: relearn how to human.”

— Charles Stross

231. “A powerful glamour has engulfed the United States of America. It’s not the first time, of course – that nation is a shining temple to amnesia with its foundations built atop the bones of vanished empires.”

— Charles Stross

232. “Of course, to have admitted that you hated football while you were working on STEAMING would have been a bit like one of the US president’s staffers confessing to thinking religion was overrated, abstinence didn’t work, and what the country really needed was a short sharp dose of communism with a side order of Islamic extremism to go.”

— Charles Stross

233. “Stop,” he commanded, and Eve saw in his eyes something shadowy and forbidding, a fell expression she never wanted to see again on her kid brother’s face.”

— Charles Stross

234. “We fight on so that something that remembers being human might survive.”

— Charles Stross

235. “Because it’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?”

— Charles Stross

236. “The morning after her date with her nerdishly cute prince of darkness, Cassie is scheduled for a lecture at nine o’clock. She blows it off because life’s too short and anyway the world is going to end in about two weeks’ time, when the Second Heavy Cavalry Brigade rumbles into town accompanied by skies that rain wyrmfire and the death spells of combat magi.”

— Charles Stross

237. “It’s amazing how much work you can get done in three days if you hold a blowtorch to each end of the candle.”

— Charles Stross

238. “Because it’s Glasgow, where the weather offers you a creative combination of hypothermia and sunburn simultaneously: and right now it’s playing a DJ mix with six El Nino events, a monsoon, and a drought on the turntables.”

— Charles Stross

239. “Ras is a big fan of Noam Chomsky; calling it the Propaganda Ministry keeps things honest, he says. Like having a Ministry of War rather than a Department of Defense, or Counting Other People’s Murdered Children instead of talking about Collateral Damage.”

— Charles Stross

240. “Jim can’t tell if he was screaming from fear or yodeling in exhilaration.”

— Charles Stross

241. “It’s like the joke about the post-modernist gangster who makes you an offer ye canna understand.”

— Charles Stross

242. “But you’re more at home with SQL than socialization: Innuendo wasn’t a language they taught in CS lab.”

— Charles Stross

243. “This is the second time you’ve been arrested in your entire life, and your stress levels are so high that were a bunch of black-robed inquisitors to file chanting into your cell and lead you down a stony tunnel lined with manacled skeletons to a cavern furnished with an electric chair, it would come as a relief.”

— Charles Stross

244. “Did you not swap out your magazine for banishment rounds?” she scolded, hands on hips. The guard looked sheepish. “But you said they was expen – ” “There is expensive and then there is needlessly paying for your funeral,” Eve snapped. An immediate ratchet and clatter of magazines being ejected and replaced signalled that the message had gotten across.”

— Charles Stross