01UndatedWhat will you tell him?""The truth."Fortismer thinks about that."Yes," he says at last. "Probably the best thing. Bloody deceptive, honesty.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
02UndatedPhotography 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 / quote ↗
03UndatedHe wondered if he should try to talk to the boy like that. Perhaps the boy wondered why he didn't. But they had silence, and not many people had that.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
05UndatedHe concluded that governments were like wars: the reasons and the forces might change, but it was still the same dying over the same soil.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
06UndatedThis 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 / quote ↗
07UndatedGarbage in, garbage out. Or rather more felicitously: the tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
08UndatedYou end up with a machine which knows that by its mildest estimate it must have terrible enemies all around and within it, but it can't find them. It therefore deduces that they are well-concealed and expert, likely professional agitators and terrorists. Thus, more stringent and probing methods are called for. Those who transgress in the slightest, or of whom even small suspicions are harboured, must be treated as terrible foes. A lot of rather ordinary people will get repeatedly investigated with increasing severity until the Government Machine either finds enemies or someone very high up indeed personally turns the tide... And these people under the microscope are in fact just taking up space in the machine's numerical model. In short, innocent people are treated as hellish fiends of ingenuity and bile because there's a gap in the numbers.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
09UndatedTo recap: it is possible to put decent information into a Government Machine, have ordinary, good people running the thing, and a reasonable system in place, and still get utter idiocy out of the dispenser?""More than possible. Likely.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
10UndatedLemons. 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 / quote ↗
11UndatedMr. Pritchard! What are you doing? Is that O-soto-gari? No! It is not! It is a yak mating with a tractor! That is really very very not very good! My grandfather is weeping in Heaven, or he would if there were such a place, which there is not because religion is a mystification contrived by monarchists! Again! Again, and this time do it properly!Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
13UndatedDon't fuck around thinking you could have done it better. There is no better. There's just not being dead.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
14UndatedModernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
15UndatedJoshua Joseph had 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 / quote ↗
16UndatedJoshua Joseph has no real 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....For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one that deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which humans use to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own little ecosystems.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
17UndatedNature intended in her design a hearty life of toil, open fires and plump old age attended by a brood of sun-touched brats.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
18UndatedJoe is never sure whether they're mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
19UndatedAre you addicted if there is simply no reason for you to do anything else?Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
20UndatedThis is the gift of focus, or wilful denial, and it is something boys are particularly good at. Girls—at least where I grew up—tend to be more emotionally balanced and sane, and therefore find the kind of all-excluding concentration you need to care about dinosaurs, taxonomy, philately and geopolitical schemes a bit worrying and sad. Girls can grasp the bigger picture (i.e., it might be better not to destroy the world over this), where boys have a perfect grip on the fine print (i.e., this insidious idea is antithetical to our existence and cannot be allowed to flourish alongside our peace-loving, free society). Note carefully how it is probably better to let the girls deal with weapons of mass destruction.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
21UndatedBecause for Gonzo, anything which may explode at any moment is clearly a girl.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
22UndatedJust got to fnafflebrump caddwallame, all right?" Edie says, and no one pays attention. She learned at Lady Gravely's that nonsense which can be misheard is a very good way to lie without getting caught. People just insert whatever they think you must be doing, and - having lied to themselves on your behalf - are disinclined to check up on you.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
23UndatedNowhere have I ever heard of Satan taking the form of an avuncular hippie. No doubt he could. It just seems inefficient.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
24UndatedI do public appearances. I'm bluff, hearty, goofy. I wear loud clothes, and I read the funny bits. I occasionally get taken to task for one thing or another, and I acknowledge my fault, my flaw, my failure, and I move on.Nick Harkaway / quote ↗
