M.R. Carey

“But the future is uncertain, and he can't get up enough enthusiasm even to masurbate.”

“Stock was a rationalist and an atheist. Most of the time she saw the world as a big machine where things just played themselves out. Anonymous forces, impersonal powers, action and reaction, cause and effect. It would be comforting to live in a world that had order and purpose in it, which she supposed was why so many people pretended they did.”

“In an age of rust, she comes up stainless steel”

“In most stories she knows, children have a mother and a father, like Iphigenia had Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, and Helen had Leda and Zeus. Sometimes they have teachers too, but not always, and they never seem to have sergeants.”

“She faces him, trying to take a breath that's long and level, trying to pull all the slopping emotions back inside so he won't see them in her face.”

“Every adult grew from a kid who beat the odds. But at different times, in different places, the odds have been appallingly steep.”

“And one of the reasons why he likes her is because she’s so different from him. She’s as big as four-fifths of five-eighths of fuck all, but she takes no bullshit from anyone. She even talks back to the Sarge, which is like watching a mouse bark at a pitbull.”

“Pritchard tutted. "Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It's an emergent property of a very complicated system.”

“Even the air seems to have a smell - earthy and rich and complicated, made out of things living nd things dying and things long dead. The smell of the world where nothing stops moving, nothing stays the same.”

“Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You've already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.”

“It all comes together inside her, and she can’t begin to explain. “It’s just a pattern,” she says, feeling bad because it’s a lie. She’s lying to Miss Justineau, who she loves more than anyone in the world. And of course the other part of the feeling, that’s even harder to say, is that they’re each other’s home now. They have to be.”