Mick Herron Quotes

office jokers were a crime in progress -

...he couldn't help wondering how it had felt: refugees turning up from concentration camps, from a broken Europe, to find this bleak estate; its squat huts their new homes.There'd been watch towers and barbed wire fences. It can't have looked like freedom. But freedom was measured, he supposed, by what you were leaving behind.

This was the blissful break when the world seemed a safer place, between the end of the Cold War and about ten minutes later.

as every office worker knows, it's not the hope that kills you. It's knowing it's the hope that kills you that kills you.

River would suggest they [Lamb, Taverner] get a room, provided the room was soundproofed, locked, and had an alligator in it.

Because we both know the tide's turning. The decent people in this country are sick to death of being held hostage by mad liberals in Brussels, and the sooner we take control over our own future, our own borders -

Regent's Park was looking to the Met for an injection of integrity, it was in serious danger of an irony meltdown.

Thus was born the Service Archive, a 'tool for correlating current events with historical precedents', which would be of incalculable strategic use assuming it was ever actually operational. Currently, though, its status was not dissimilar to that of countless other Civil Service projects, in that its existence had been ordained, the process for bringing it into being had been set in motion, and it would thus continue gestating until it was officially put a stop to, despite having long been forgotten about by everyone concerned in its conception.
Pg 202

The thing about somebody else's car was, it was automatically an all-terrain vehicle.

Those who write the rules rarely suffer their weight.

Why am I telling you this?'
'So you'll have an excuse to kill me?'
'That's probably it.

Nobody left Slough House at the end of a working day feeling like they'd contributed to the security of the nation. They left it feeling like their brains had been fed through a juicer.

That was the true purpose of Slough House. It was a way of losing people without having to get rid of them, sidestepping legal hassle and tribunal threats.

He eyed her critically. "You look like all your birthdays came at once."
"I look happy to you?"
"No, old. Am I the only one round here speaks English?

Lamb stood, gazed at the nearest tree as if in sudden awe of nature, lifted a heel from the ground and farted.

"Sign of a good curry," he said, "Sometimes they just bubble about inside you for ages."

"I keep meaning to ask why you have never married," River said.

She started drawing up a mental list of everyone she didn't trust, and had to stop immediately. She didn't have all day.

But there was nothing, and never would be. Learning that was one thing. Living with it, another entirely. Careful

How's your career looking?'
'Well, I don't have an arse two inches in front of my nose, so my view beats yours.

He still read copy as if it were Braille; bumps in the language letting him know when

This thing couldn't have fallen apart faster if you'd bought it at Ikea, and

It turned out that in the governance of a nation's security, many absurd situations had to be worked around: a toxic clown in the Foreign Office [Boris Johnson], a state visit by a narcissistic bed-wetter [Trump], the tendency of the electorate to jump off' the occasional cliff [Brexit].

...What did you say?" "You heard me, River. I'm your father." "My father?" "You want to hear it in a Darth Vader voice?" River didn't want to hear it at all. He blinked several times, but nothing altered.

He and I, we're friends. Does that sound odd? Me, friends with a pinko journalist?'
Nothing sounded odd to Lamb; except, perhaps, that people had friends.

She'd read a lot of discussions about 9/11, obviously, but contributions from structural engineers had been conspicuous by their absence. And

As for Lamb, he'd hang River out to dry if he took another step without putting him in the picture. That was something to think about, so River thought about it as he stuffed the phone away, and took the rest of the stairs three at a time.

Everyone wanted a life less ordinary. And only a tiny minority ever got it, and even they probably didn't appreciate it much.

Like most forms of corruption, it began with men in suits.

Lamb said, 'If you had issues with him, I could have spoken to HR. Arranged an intervention.' He tapped Moody's shoulder with his foot. 'Breaking his neck without going through your line manager, that shit stays on your record.

He raised a hand to forestall her response.
'Don't bother denying it. We both know the PM's a tormented creature [Theresa May]. Like one of those soft toys lorry drivers fix to their radiator grilles.That expression she wears, it's terror at all the oncoming vehicles.