Top 70 Nick Harkaway Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Nick Harkaway

2. “The tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.”

— Nick Harkaway

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

— Nick Harkaway

4. “The house always wins.” “The house doesn’t even need to win. There’s no game because the house owns everything. The money you bet with, the air you breathe. The myth is that when the wheel spins it’s any different from when it’s standing still.”

— Nick Harkaway

5. “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.”

— Nick Harkaway

6. “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.”

— Nick Harkaway

7. “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.”

— Nick Harkaway

8. “I love you forever. I am sorry I cannot love you now.”

— Nick Harkaway

9. “I am Nemesis, meting out just deserts.”

— Nick Harkaway

10. “If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.”

— Nick Harkaway

11. “Soot and sorrow: the Night Market’s invocation of desperate seriousness, of doom and disaster.”

— Nick Harkaway

12. “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.”

— Nick Harkaway

13. “In a lot of places, of course, the ’80s had never really come to an end.”

— Nick Harkaway

14. “It’s not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it’s that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.”

— Nick Harkaway

15. “No. The moral of the story in so far as it has one is that cannibals can study logic, and that if you are going to leave the path, you better have your wits about you and know better than to trust the first scary old lady who talks to you in public.”

— Nick Harkaway

16. “Society is based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being continually dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything.”

— Nick Harkaway

17. “The Brit abroad is always the voice of caution. Persons of other cultures are known to be undisciplined, prone to leaning out of car windows and cooking with garlic.”

— Nick Harkaway

18. “Just because something is done according to the law does not mean that it is lawful. Law is made in the image of an ideal. One can make a law that does not reflect that image, and that law may be a law without being lawful.”

— Nick Harkaway

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

— Nick Harkaway

20. “Being a little less good than someone who is brilliant is a failure to be cherished.”

— Nick Harkaway

21. “Annabelle growls tunelessly, like a bear hibernating on a bassoonist.”

— Nick Harkaway

22. “Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate.”

— Nick Harkaway

23. “Even the gauntlet that I cast into the teeth of those Georgians – the worthless men and pustulant boys who were so brave as to call my granddaughter foul names from behind digital masks, who threw around threats of sexual assault and murder as if these things were not the ugliest depth to which a man may fall – even my fictitious software application was a cry of rage at Ethiopia, in a way.”

— Nick Harkaway

24. “Nowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient.”

— Nick Harkaway

25. “We need to create the institutions that will support the society we want to live in. The only answer is collective action.”

— Nick Harkaway

26. “Lemons. He liked lemons. They made you make funny faces when you bit them, and a very, very long way in the future there was a really amazing planet where they’d evolved into people and lived in harmony with a variety of hyper-intelligent bee. Evolution. Thousands and thousands of years of tiny changes could turn little burning sparks of chemistry into people, into monsters and angels and even human beings.”

— Nick Harkaway

27. “All stories are one story, in the end.”

— Nick Harkaway

28. “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.”

— Nick Harkaway

29. “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.”

— Nick Harkaway

30. “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.”

— Nick Harkaway

31. “Thus Gonzo, incendiarist and leader of men.”

— Nick Harkaway

32. “Questions that trouble the mind are the only ones worth considering.”

— Nick Harkaway

33. “We should be worrying about if you live in the city you’re more likely to have anxiety or mood disorders and to be schizophrenic. More than the problems people have from social media.”

— Nick Harkaway

34. “He seems an unlikely companion for a woman like Edie Banister, but the world, Daniel once observed, is a great honeycombed thing composed of separated mysteries.”

— Nick Harkaway

35. “This place does not feel like my country. It feels like countries I have read about where things are very bad. It feels, in fact, like exactly the kind of thing we were protesting against, but we thought it was elsewhere. It is not heartening to find that it has come to us.”

— Nick Harkaway

36. “The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it’s so hard to do just one.”

— Nick Harkaway

37. “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.”

— Nick Harkaway

38. “Perhaps there was another life, not so sad, that I missed somehow this time, and will have in another world.”

— Nick Harkaway

39. “The devil in the detail is that Smart Crowds are fragile. With a very little adulteration, they cease to be smart at all, and become remarkably stupid, or indeed self-harming. They are susceptible to stampeding by demagogues, poisoning by bad information. They can be made afraid, and when they do they become mobs. They can be divided by scapegoating and prejudice, bought off in fragments, even just romanced by pretty faces.”

— Nick Harkaway

40. “I have wrangles with Facebook, entered fictitious trips because I can’t get the map to get off my page, don’t want people to know where I live. It is possible to carve out a space that’s your own.”

— Nick Harkaway

41. “If Pippa Middleton and Megan Fox had announced their intention to marry during a live theatrical production of Fifty Shades of Grey starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and then taken off their clothes to reveal their bodies tattooed with the text of the eighth Harry Potter novel, they might just have approached this level of frenzy. But probably not, the boy said, because not everyone liked Benedict Cumberbatch.”

— Nick Harkaway

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

— Nick Harkaway

43. “Gonzo’s father told his son to grieve without reservation or embarrassment until he could grieve solemnly and inwardly, and then finally to hang up his tears and wear them only occasionally, as befits the true men of the heart. Grief is not a thing to be ashamed of or suppressed, he told Gonzo. Nor yet is it a thing to cherish. Feel it, inhabit it and leave it behind. It is right, but it is not the end.”

— Nick Harkaway

44. “The doings of this small island are a curiosity only, something everyone who lives here is prone to forget.”

— Nick Harkaway

45. “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. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system.”

— Nick Harkaway

46. “A warsheep would be a cross between a dolphin and a small, limber elephant.”

— Nick Harkaway

47. “Destiny’ is the state of perfect mechanical causation in which everything is the consequence of everything else. If choice is an illusion, what’s life? Consciousness without volition. We’d all be passengers, no more real than model trains.”

— Nick Harkaway

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

— Nick Harkaway

49. “He lounged and exhaled, and felt some small part of himself relax, like the moment when the elastic band on a child’s toy plane, wound and wound until the twisting redoubles upon itself and then let go to power the propeller, spasms once and releases that second layer of knots. He.”

— Nick Harkaway

50. “When your friend is decomposing, surely you owe it to them to inhale their death. To do otherwise seems impossible prim.”

— Nick Harkaway