Paul Cornell Quotes

Wisdom: Mate, we're up to our necks in Skrulls! But we remembered the treaty: mutual protection. Here we are! Now, I've lost a couple of people I care about in quick succession, and I am taking no more bollocks from you. I've got this voice in my head, it's half Gandalf and half Mr. Kipling. Who is that?!
Oberon: A VOICE?! YOU MUST NOT FOLLOW IT! IT'S THE MAD ONE, THE DEMON WHO KILLED HIS OWN CHILD AND LED EVERYONE TO DESTRUCTION! THE HIGHER EVOLUTIONARIES OF ALL THE WORLDS HAVE ONLY JUST SUCCEEDED IN CONFINING HIM TO THE DARK REALMS!
Wisdom: Oh. Right. Him. Well, I'm gonna stop following that voice then. Obviously.

DI Cartwright: The cat is booby trapped? DI Quill: Welcome to my world.

After the three of them got back to the Portakabin, while Quill and Ross started to add the details from the manuscript pages to the Ops Board, Sefton got out his special notebook and checked through everything he'd written down about his encounter with ... whatever Brutus had been. I was proceeding in a mystical direction when I encountered a six-foot-two Roman male, with whom I shared a certain sexual tension.

(The Skrull Beatles discuss their future.)
"So when this is all over, are we still gonna be the Skrull Beatles then?"
"I quite fancy being the Skrull Monkees for a bit."
"The dialogue's easier."
"As long as I get to be Peter Tork.

To get to Earth from the edge of the solar system, depending on the time of year and the position of the planets, you need to pass through at least Poland, Prussia, and Turkey, and you'd probably get stamps in your passport from a few of the other great powers. Then as you get closer to the world, you arrive at a point, in the continually shifting carriage space over the countries, where this complexity has to give way or fail. And so you arrive in the blissful lubrication of neutral orbital territory.

There's a word people in business use a lot: disruptive. The market can never be stable, the best it can be is falling apart in useful ways. Like the universe in general, really. To disrupt the market in your favour is now seen as being the ultimate achievement. Create a climate of absolute uncertainty, continual fear about enormous change, and you'll see people's . . . well, I was about to say 'true selves,' but they don't really have true selves, they're continually falling apart too . . . you'll see people concentrate on looking after themselves and their own, grabbing for familiar symbols. The right . . . brands, shall we say, can prosper hugely then, in the ultimate disruption.

Judith hated nostalgia. It was just the waiting room for death.

The neighbors ... hadn't, thankfully, done the usual by saying that Losley was a pleasant neighbor who'd kept herself to herself. (Always delivered in a tone of voice that suggested that, since keeping oneself to oneself was the single greatest thing one English person could do for another, the suspect ought to be excused whatever psychopathic shit they'd visited on other people.)

The brilliant escape, the funny line to cap it, despite the lack of timing. And the girl was still dead. The last act had not materialised. The world, and himself, remained so far from what they should be: so imperfect.

When Captain America died, Americans heard it in an American way: through the media. When Captain Britain died, the British felt it in their chests.

Captain Midlands: "I met the real you once."
John (Lennon) the Skrull: "You're meeting the real me now."
Captain Midlands: "I told him to get his bleedin' hair cut.

So," he said to Sefton, "you knew that ghosts were real ... and you led us to the 'most haunted building in London.' What's up with that?

The telemarketers who called her up now seemed either desperate or resigned to the point of a mindless drone, until Judith, who had time on her hands and ice in her heart, engaged them in dark conversations that always got her removed from their lists.

I don't think [Russell T Davies] sits up at night worrying about canonicity, except for the times when I'm pretty sure he does.

Sometimes love creeps upon me, and I suddenly sort of just realise that it's there when i start shaving my legs every day and singing on my bicycle.

John Smith: Mankind doesn't need warfare and bloodshed to prove itself. Everyday life can provide honour and valour. Let's hope that from now on this country can find its heroes in smaller places. In the most ordinary of deeds.

He's like fire and ice and rage. He's like the night, and the storm in the heart of the sun. He's ancient and forever. He burns at the center of time and he can see the turn of the universe. And ... he's wonderful. - Tim Latimer

Stories are about endings,' he'd said. 'They don't mean anything unless they come to an end.

John: I'm experiencing an odd sensation. I think it might be patriotism.
Spitfire: Steady. Too much of that can damage your health.

John the Skrull: (as Merlyn) "Here, listen. It's me, Merlyn, the magic man. There's no need for all this conflict, like. I command you to
"
Tink: "Suck my tits, you fairy fuckers!"
John the Skrull: "I was going to say 'give peace a chance' ...

Wisdom: Oh, fantastic. We've got an army made up of fairies and Beatles, and we're fighting H. G. Wells' martians and bloody Jack the Rippers. Who's next? Dick Van Dyke? Mr Bean? John Cleese and his dead parrot?

Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority.

He'd actually done it! He leaned back into the microphone and whispered to the now silent cave: 'Come to the Cabaret!

Rumpty! he muttered, which was very rude if you were one of the few people in the universe who understood what it meant.

Hell is where time has stopped, where there's no more innovation. No horizon. No change. I sometimes think Hell would suit the British down to the ground, and that, given the chance, they'd vote for it.

You hear stories like that all your life and think: cool, a ghost bus. But now we have to look at this stuff analytically ... a ghost bus?! The "ghost" of a motor vehicle? A public conveyance, presumably, which didn't head towards the light, move on to join the choir invisible in ... bus heaven, the great terminus in the sky, where all good buses go when they ... I don't know, break down, but instead is doomed to ... drive eternally the streets of Earth! How can there be a ghost bus?!

Only fools and criminals didn't know why they did things.

Graveyards were usually, in his team's experience, a bad idea. This one was full of greenish lights that danced between the graves, and there were a couple of swaying figures, one an emaciated husk with glowing eyes who had taken to ... yes, there he was again this morning, like every morning.
Quill tiredly raised his hand to return the wave.

In this place, upwards of 400,000
British men were going to be killed. They'd lost 20,000
just the other day. He sucked a grim smile. It was like
rich countries deliberately killing themselves, leaving
their battered remains ready for the revolution that would surely come, for who could return home without
wanting to face those who had wasted good men thus?

Judith realised, with horror, that they were heading over to talk to her, and couldn't find, at a quick glance, anyone else she knew well enough to get into a conversation with. There were, just occasionally, drawbacks to being a nasty old bitch.

Monsters were one thing. She was used to monsters, she could deal with monsters. A noise in the darkness, with nothing attached to it, was another.