Nick Harkaway Quotes

I hover over the expensive Scotch and then the Armagnac, but finally settle on a glass of rich red claret. I put it near my nose and nearly pass out. It smells of old houses and aged wood and dark secrets, but also of hard, hot sunshine through ancient shutters and long, wicked afternoons in a four-poster bed. It’s not a wine, it’s a life, right there in the glass.

Never mind, never mind, let’s get to the part where we smite the unrighteous. I’ve brought my most alarming teeth!

People don’t want children to know what they need to know. They want their kids to know what they ought to need to know. If you’re a teacher you’re in a constant battle with mildly deluded adults who think the world will get better if you imagine it is better. You want to teach about sex? Fine, but only when they’re old enough to do it. You want to talk politics? Sure, but nothing modern. Religion? So long as you don’t actually think about it. Otherwise some furious mob will come to your house and burn you for a witch.

The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it’s so hard to do just one.

Law is error, you see. It’s an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

Google says young people don’t care about privacy, but when asked if they’d let their parents see their phone bills and other stuff they say no.

And don’t tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn’t. We never reach the end. All we ever get is means. That’s what we live with.

Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.

Newton’s work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future.

We should be worrying about if you live in the city you’re more likely to have anxiety or mood disorders and to be schizophrenic. More than the problems people have from social media.

Photography 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.

I have known heaven, and now I am in hell, and there are mimes.