Blue Ant trilogy

"“Fucking hell,” hissed Clammy. “What are you doing here?” “Looking for denim,” Hollis said, then had to point back at the shop, having no idea what it was called, discovering simultaneously that it apparently had no sign. “Gabriel Hounds. They don’t have any.” Clammy’s eyebrows might have gone up, beneath his black beanie. “Next to fucking impossible to find,” he pronounced, gravely. As if suddenly taking her, to her amazement and for the first time, seriously."

"“Know what? The salt of the fucking earth never tells you it’s the salt of the fucking earth. People who get scammed, they’re all people who don’t know that.”"

"There was something she found deeply peculiar about Milgrim's affect, even in this brief an exchange. He seemed genuinely mild, amiable, but also singularly alert, in some skewed way, as if there were something else looking out, around corners, swift and peripheral. "Why is Hubertus interested in fashion, now?” Hollis asked. “He isn’t. In any ordinary sense. That I know of.” And the obliquely-looking-out thing was there again, around that interior corner, and she felt its intelligence. “What is it, exactly, that you do, for him, around clothing? Are you a designer? A marketer?” “No. I notice things. I’m good with detail. I didn’t know that. It was something he pointed out to me.”"

"Milgrim looked up from the plate, both elements of his oddly fragmented self seeming for the first time to see her simultaneously. “Why don’t you sing?” “Because I don’t sing,” Hollis said. “But you were famous. You must have been. There was a poster.”"

"“Why did you take my picture?” Milgrim asked, unexpectedly bypassing his robot voice and sounding like a completely different person, the one you automatically and immediately arrest. “I’m obsessive,” Whitaker said. Milgrim blinked, shuddered."

"“I wish I had a book.” There were a few expensively bound and weirdly neutered bookazines here, but he knew from glancing through them that these were bland advertisements for being wealthy, wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative. Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug."

"“What happened to your line?” Hollis asked. “Business happened…We crashed and burned. There might be a warehouse full of our last season in Seattle. If I could find it, get my hands on it, the eBay sales would be worth more money than we ever saw from the line.”"

"They don’t know they’re con men…wildly overconfident. Omnipotence, omniscience—that’s part of the mythology that surrounds the Special Forces…Your guy can walk in the door and promise training in something he personally doesn’t know how to do, and not even realize he’s bullshitting about his own capabilities. It’s a special kind of gullibility…psychic tactical equipment. The Army put him through schools that promised to teach him how to do everything, everything that matters. And he believed them."

""You can do sneaky-ass," Winnie said, "Instinct tells me. Whose phone are you using?…I just e-mailed the number to someone, and they’re telling me the GPS is very amusing. Unless you’ve taken up marathon randomized teleportation.”"

"Milgrim knew almost nothing about Fiona's mother, other than that she’d once been involved with Bigend, but he’d always found the idea of girlfriends having parents intimidating."

"Simply in terms of ingredients, it’s about recent trends in the evolution of the psychology of luxury goods, crooked former Special Forces officers, corrupt military contractors, the wonderfully bizarre symbiotic relationship between designers of high-end snowboarding gear and manufacturers of military clothing, and the increasingly virtual nature of the global market."

"I called it "Zero History" because one of the characters has had a missing decade, during which he paid no taxes and had no credit cards. He meets a federal agent, who tells him that that combination indicates to her that he hasn’t been up to much good, the past ten years…Events find him, and he starts to acquire a history. And, one assumes, a credit rating, and the need to pay taxes. It’s also the first book I’ve written in which anyone gets engaged to be married."