Top 70 Mick Herron Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Yes yes yes, we’ll get the grammar police onto her first thing. Do they have actual powers of arrest, do you think? Or will they just hang her from the nearest participle?”

— Mick Herron

2. “The public was like one of those huge Pacific jellyfish; one enormous, pulsating mass of indifference, drifting wherever the current carried it; an organism without a motive, ambition or original sin to call its own, but which somehow believed, in whatever passed for its brain, that it chose its own leaders and had a say in its own destiny.”

— Mick Herron

3. “Having a cat is one small step from having two cats, and to be a single woman within a syllable of fifty in possession of two cats is tantamount to declaring life over.”

— Mick Herron

4. “The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. – Robert Conquest’s third law of politics.”

— Mick Herron

5. “Like most forms of corruption, it began with men in suits.”

— Mick Herron

6. “God,’ said Jackson Lamb. ‘Is it me, or did all the fun go out of everything round about 1979?”

— Mick Herron

7. “When the cat was away, Lamb had been known to remark, the mice started farting about with notions of democratic freedom. Then the cat returned in a tank.”

— Mick Herron

8. “Conspiracy theorists, she knew, were paranoid by definition, and usually with good reason – they were indeed being watched, largely because they were standing on an upturned bucket, haranguing the sheeple about their wingnut delusions.”

— Mick Herron

9. “Blessed are the unforgiving, for they shall come out even. That was the lost frigging beatitude as far as Bad Sam Chapman was concerned. As for the meek: we’ll make them give it back.”

— Mick Herron

10. “That was the true purpose of Slough House. It was a way of losing people without having to get rid of them, sidestepping legal hassle and tribunal threats.”

— Mick Herron

11. “Half of the future is buried in the past. That was the prevailing Service culture. Hence.”

— Mick Herron

12. “He has the people skills of a natterjack toad, but he knows his way round the ether.”

— Mick Herron

13. “When he’d finished, he produced an unbranded packet of cigarettes: stubby, filterless, lethal. A health warning would have been like subtitles on a porn film. Utterly beside the point.”

— Mick Herron

14. “I’m from yeoman stock. Generations back, my family were farmers.’ ‘Generations back everybody’s family were farmers.”

— Mick Herron

15. “He hated that upward inflection. How did the young let each other know when an answer was required?”

— Mick Herron

16. “Nobody left Slough House at the end of a working day feeling like they’d contributed to the security of the nation. They left it feeling like their brains had been fed through a juicer.”

— Mick Herron

17. “The thing about somebody else’s car was, it was automatically an all-terrain vehicle.”

— Mick Herron

18. “And even if she does, she might end up with the life choices of a carrot.”

— Mick Herron

19. “This was the blissful break when the world seemed a safer place, between the end of the Cold War and about ten minutes later.”

— Mick Herron

20. “And no amount of Kevlar offered protection from a woman’s disappointment.”

— Mick Herron

21. “Those who write the rules rarely suffer their weight.”

— Mick Herron

22. “One of the unforeseen consequences of Brexit, reflected Whelan, was that it had elevated to positions of undue prominence any number of nasty little toerags. Ah well. The people had spoken.”

— Mick Herron

23. “Fear lives in the guts. That’s where it makes its home. It moves in, shifts stuff around; empties a space for itself – it likes the echoes its wingbeats make. It likes the smell of its own farts.”

— Mick Herron

24. “She started drawing up a mental list of everyone she didn’t trust, and had to stop immediately. She didn’t have all day.”

— Mick Herron

25. “Things aren’t always black and white, River. A wise man once said he wouldn’t trust anyone who hadn’t been a radical in his youth, and Communism was the radicalism of choice back then.”

— Mick Herron

26. “Circles were traditionally vicious. Catherine suspected other shapes had teeth too, but better PR.”

— Mick Herron

27. “Nothing more frightening, to someone who’d lived by his wits, than to be slowly losing them.”

— Mick Herron

28. “Besides, leaked evidence would have resulted in a whitewash, or a Select Committee Inquiry as they were also known;.”

— Mick Herron

29. “But thanks for the mansplanation, Cartwright,” Lamb said. He looked at Louisa. “Mansplaining is when a man tells a woman something she already knows in a patronising, condescending manner,” he said, slowly and clearly. “Thanks.” “Do you need me to repeat that?” “No, I’m good.” “Excellent.”

— Mick Herron

30. “Everyone wanted a life less ordinary. And only a tiny minority ever got it, and even they probably didn’t appreciate it much.”

— Mick Herron

31. “On discovering a fire, the instructions ran, shout Fire and try to put it out. It was useful, heart-of the matter advice, and could be extended almost indefinitely in any direction. On discovering your husband’s guests are arseholes, shout Arseholes and try to put them out.”

— Mick Herron

32. “Noon comes with bells on, because this is London, and London is a city of bells. From its heart to its ragged edges, they bisect the day in a jangle of sound: peals and tinkles and deep bass knells. They ring from steeples and clocktowers, from churches and town halls, in an overlapping celebration of the everyday fact that time passes.”

— Mick Herron

33. “Smoking was almost as good a guarantor of privacy as fake birdshit. Though give it another year or two, and it would probably be an arrestable offence.”

— Mick Herron

34. “He still read copy as if it were Braille; bumps in the language letting him know when.”

— Mick Herron

35. “Last winter, she’d walked this path with Min, heading for the Christmas Fair – there’d been a ferris wheel and skating, mulled wine, minced pies. At an air-rifle booth, Min had missed the target five times in a row. “Cover”, he’d said. “Don’t want everyone knowing I’m a trained sharpshooter.”

— Mick Herron

36. “As for Lamb, he’d hang River out to dry if he took another step without putting him in the picture. That was something to think about, so River thought about it as he stuffed the phone away, and took the rest of the stairs three at a time.”

— Mick Herron

37. “The political fog of the times had changed that, and political fog, as history has illustrated, is best dispelled by the waving of flags and banners, which usually foreshadows the use of truncheons and sticks.”

— Mick Herron

38. “History has an open-door policy. Any fool can walk right in.”

— Mick Herron

39. “If you carried on looking like you were holding it all together, pretty soon you were holding it all together.”

— Mick Herron

40. “To pass for real in the world of the web she’d had to forget everything she’d ever known about grammar, wit, spelling, manners and literary criticism.”

— Mick Herron

41. “If time was the means by which the universe prevented everything from happening at once, coincidence was the excuse it used when things occasionally did.”

— Mick Herron

42. “When there’s something I don’t want to be bothered by, I like to know what it is first. So I can be sure it’s not something I’d rather be bothered by.”

— Mick Herron

43. “This is what memory is: an abiding awareness that some things have vanished. And this is what consciousness is: the knowledge that more absences will come.”

— Mick Herron

44. “But if there’s one thing we should have learned by now, it’s that once you’ve incited the mob, you can’t turn it off again. And there’s never been a mob that didn’t end up eating itself.”

— Mick Herron

45. “But I came to recognise that there will always be those who will do everything in their power to maintain the status quo, even when that so obviously favours such a small section of society.”

— Mick Herron

46. “The paths to power of current world leaders – paths including conspiracy to assault, knee-jerk racism, indeterminate fecundity and cheating at golf – were so askew from the traditional routes that only an idiot would have dared forecast future developments.”

— Mick Herron

47. “Don’t knock cipher clerks,” Katinsky told him. “Like any other branch of the Civil Service, all the work’s done low on the food chain. Everyone else just has meetings.”

— Mick Herron

48. “The only reason for the absence of a sign requiring entrants to abandon all hope is that, as every office worker knows, it’s not the hope that kills you. It’s knowing it’s the hope that kills you that kills you.”

— Mick Herron

49. “It was an ancient thing, a Nokia, black-and-grey, with about as many functions as a bottle opener. You could no more take a photo with it than send an e-mail with a stapler.”

— Mick Herron

50. “There was a story doing the rounds that the list of questions traditionally asked of head injury victims, to check for concussion – what’s the date, where do you live, who is the Prime Minister? – had had to be amended in light of the current incumbents turn your, as the widespread disbelief but he was still in office was producing a rash of false positives.”

— Mick Herron