He’s not as bad as everyone makes out. He might buy venerable old companies and strip their assets, causing numerous layoffs and the odd corporate suicide or two, but that’s business. Inside, he’s a big teddy bear.
Jack said nothing. It was time to start putting his plan into action. Then he remembered: He didn’t have one.
Mary?” said an officer who was carrying a large potted plant in the manner of someone who thinks it is well outside his job description.
So you could value your own life,” replied the Titan. “Before that you were under the gods’ thumbs, doing their bidding without caring if you lived or died. When you could see that life was worth living by your fear of the unknown that was death, then you could really make things happen.
There’s more to good or bad than what’s written in the Rulebook.
For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.
Businessman, philanthropist, large egg.
Dragons, like four o’clock tea, crumpets, marmalade, and zip-up cardigans, are a peculiarity to the Ununited Kingdoms. They are fierce, fire-breathing creatures of great intelligence, dignity, and sensitivity who could and did converse on matters of great importance. But for all their intelligence, wit, and social graces, dragons still had one habit that made them impossible to ignore.” “And that is?” “They liked to eat people.
Working with those versed in the Mystical Arts was sometimes like trying to knit with wet spaghetti: just when you thought you’d gotten somewhere, it all came to pieces in your hands.
The real world is a book in bad need of an editor.
The actor in with them was Graham Huxtable. He was putting on a felonious one-man performance of Twelfth Night. Persistent offender. He’ll be fined and bound over. His Malvolio is truly frightful.
Everyone can do a bit,” I said, wondering where Kevin Zipp was. “If you’re thinking of somebody and the phone rings and it’s them, that’s magic. If you get a curious feeling that you’ve been or done something before, then that’s magic, too. It’s everywhere. It seeps into the fabric of the world and oozes out as coincidence, fate, chance, luck, or what have you. The big problem is having enough magic to make it work for you in some useful manner.
We’re all something we’re not,′ he said. ‘Every one of us is stuck between the person we want to be and the person we can be. And there doesn’t have to be a why. All things have to do is feel right.
Of all the Winter Service Industries, the Winter Consul was the most dangerous. Few who joined expected to last out the decade, yet recruitment was never much of a problem. You didn’t find the job, they said, it found you. No-one ever who entered the Winter voluntarily wasn’t trying to leave something behind.
Sometimes I wonder if the human race isn’t collectively as mad as a sack of door knobs.
Feedback loops, echo chambers, circular reinforcement. All could play a part in escalating the utterly imaginary to the level of reality, sometimes with fatal consequences.
Joffy had decided many years before that the problem with religion wasn’t religion itself but its flagrant misuse as an absolutist argument to promote narrow tribal agendas.
Clarke’s Second Law of Egodynamics: “For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.
Punching goblins, replied Sprockett soothingly, while offering short-term relief, has no long-term beneficial value.
Do you know what happened when they tried to upgrade SCROLL?” said Bradshaw. “The system conflict wiped out the entire library at Alexandria – they had to torch the lot to stop it spreading.