"According to my therapist, attaching conditionals to your past is a classic distancing technique indicating an unwillingness to face your memories directly. Or, I pointed out, it could be a rhetorical device designed to add a humorous note to enliven a story. To which she said, “Or both.” You can’t win with therapists, you know. And even if you do, they just tell you it’s part of the process."

"“Giant squids are pretty alien,” I said. “Not to another giant squid,” said Beverley."

"This is what’s known as operational flexibility, and definitely not making it up as you go along."

"But this was the eighteenth century, when life was cheap and ambition unlimited."

"If you run everywhere you miss stuff that you might have been better off noticing—just saying."

"None of those choices seemed likely, but if I’ve learned one thing on the job, it is that a coincidence can kill someone just as easily as malice."

"“When you say shades, what do you mean?” I asked. “Do you mean Fae?” “I mean everything that’s not normal,” said Mrs. Chin. “Like New Jersey,” said Stephen."

"“You’re probably wondering why I decided to grace you with my presence,” he said. Which was true, since DCIs spend most of their life in their offices or, worse, in other people’s offices and conference rooms. “Playing,” Seawoll once said, “pin the fucking buzzword on the sodding flow chart.”"

"It was already one of the hazards of being police that you became suspicious of the everyday. You didn’t have to spend much time on the job before realising that professional criminals are comparatively rare and that crime is something committed by ordinary people."

"Now I was used to it, the bell-like silence was louder than ever, and I was starting to get undertones of orange blossom and incense. You have to be careful with this stuff or you begin to sound like a wine taster—with about the same amount of meaningless bollocks."

"“Desperate people do desperate things,” said Spencer-Talbot. “Perhaps if we all did more to make things less desperate, then perhaps there would be less violence.”"

"I wondered, not for the first time, whether all farmers become obsessed or if only obsessive people become farmers."

"What was a billionaire supposed to do? There was a limit to the effectiveness of charity, and paying more taxes just meant the government wasted your money on bureaucracy and cushy jobs for civil servants."

"God, I thought, Mum’s going to be upset if the rapture arrives and Jesus looks like Robin Williams."

"Nothing beats a long wait at a bus stop as a reality check."

"“There’s no glamour in infrastructure,” he said as he filled our glasses again. “Steve and wee little William, right? They make stuff everyone uses every day but nobody thinks about the plumbing until it goes wrong.”"

"“I’m a magician, I am,” he said. “I can see things that are really there.”"

"He’d obviously wanted to tell someone about it for a long time and I was a convenient ear. I get that a lot. Stephanopoulos calls it my secret weapon. “It’s that vacant expression,” she said. “People just want to fill the empty void.”"

"Miss Karmargi who’d been my Religious Education teacher at school. An avowed atheist who’d once said that she respected all religions equally—“which is more than can be said for most religions,” she’d added."

"The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back. —Anonymous"

"There were a couple of mentions of drones, but the assumption was that they were operated by the police, the gangs, space lizards or all three at once. The media were continuing their comforting lack of interest in things that didn’t fit their various agendas."

"“My mum is game for any branch of Christianity that involves singing and hellfire,” I said. “She likes churches so much she switches to a new one twice a year.”"

"From a policing point of view, 3-D printers were your classic new technology. Everybody knew they were going to be used by criminals for something, but nobody was sure what."

"“Not your type?” “I’m strictly a case by case kind of guy. But if I had a type it wouldn’t be him.”"

"And what they don’t want you to know, you definitely want to know."

"I don’t like the fact that all we have so far is that somebody did something to somebody at some time which may or may not have some fucking connection so some other people who we’re not sure still exist."

"“The timing might not be significant,” I said. “Just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean they’re related.” Abigail gave me a withering look. But everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information."

"“Are you smarter than me?” “I’ll answer that when you give me a working definition of intelligence.”"

"The prisons are full of people with poor impulse control and a lack of foresight."

"“That’s assuming that the Singularity hasn’t already happened,” said Victor. “And we’re not sentient virtual personalities inhabiting a simulation of reality.” “How would we know?” I said."

"It’s one of those weird truths you learn early on as police that quite a high percentage of the public have all the survival instinct of a moth in a candle factory. They run the wrong way, they refuse to move, some will run toward the danger, and others will instantly whip out their phones and take footage."

"Old Street roundabout is a diamond-shaped circulatory system designed in the late 1960s to thin out the number of cyclists heading in and out of the City. In line with the then-current planning conventions they added a series of mugger-friendly underpasses, an insufficiently wide entrance to Old Street Underground station, and a small shopping arcade lined with urine-attracting beige tile.… You can say what you like about late-sixties architecture, but when they baked in the ugly they baked it in good."

"Been there, I thought, done that, read The Silmarillion."

"“There’s paperwork for magic? asked Vanessa. “Not so glamorous now, eh?” I said."

"I asked Reynolds if she could put the bodyguards on what we’d taken to calling the Unreality List of people that might be magical, members of the demi-monde or suspiciously weird. “It would save ever so much time,” Reynolds had said when we set it up, “if we just added the population of Florida right at the start.”"

"I’m sorry, I couldn’t find “a good song” in your music. —Siri"

"“Are there aliens?” Simon asks Indigo. “Not that I know of,” she says. “Unless you count cats.”"

"“This is a terrible work,” I said. “Why did you do it?” “The usual reasons,” said the Magister. “I told myself it was piety and duty to the Church, but a thousand years of contemplation will batter down the doors of one’s own delusions.”"

"“An AGI?” I asked, because at the Serious Cybernetics Corporation it was important to make a distinction between Artificial General Intelligence and ordinary AI. AGI being the sort that was self-aware enough to pass the Turing test and ask difficult philosophical questions before going “Daisy-Daisy” and trying to wipe out humanity, while ordinary AI mainly tried to sell you books on Amazon."

"You make a plan without intelligence—you might as well not have a plan at all."

"“Have fun,” she says and releases me. “Make trouble.”"

"The first rule of Big Brother is that Big Brother is never watching when you want him to."

"The more power something has, the less the actual facts matter."

"Still magic, like policing, has always been much more about the practice than the theory."

"“These people are not to be trusted,” I said. “These people?” “People with…” I looked over at the poshest person I’ve ever met and tried to think of the right word. “Entitlement,” I said. “They’re not good at keeping promises."

"I could see the cartoon slot machine flicker behind his eyes. Nightingale was offering what the ridiculously rich always crave—a chance to be exclusive."

"That at least we can leave to Abdul and the irrepressible Dr Vaughan," said Nightingale. "Who no doubt will be delighted to extend the boundaries of their empire of information." "Their knowledge base," I said. "I believe that's what I said."

"Upstairs, MOLA’s offices had the same open-plan cubicle based workspace that has been the delight of code monkeys and low-level paper pushers since one time and motion consultant said to another, “Hey, you know, I don’t think we’ve really dehumanized these white collar drones enough.”"

"Lots of angled struts, planes of glass and random spikes. It was, as architectural theorists like to say, a bold statement and the statement was: “Fuck truth and beauty. We’ve got money and loads of it.”"

"Nothing attracts the powerful quite like more power."