Good Omens
It'd be a funny old world, he reflected, if demons went around trusting one another. (GO)
... all tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums. (GO)
Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for Exhibit A. (GO)
But you couldn't tell that to demons like Hastur and Ligur. Fourteenth century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly is was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldn't pick the buggers off one by one any more; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldn't understand. They'd never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example, of value-added tax. Or Manchester.
He'd been particularly pleased with Manchester. (GO)
That's how it goes, you think you’re on top of the world, and suddenly they spring Armageddon on you. (GO)
... when it came to avoiding going to church, the church he stolidly avoided going to was St. Cecil and All Angels, no-nonsense C of E, and he wouldn’t have dreamed of avoiding going to any other. (GO)
Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. (GO)
... Sister Mary was a nurse and nurses, whatever their creed, are primarily nurses, which had a lot to do with wearing your watch upside down, keeping calm in emergencies, and dying for a cup of tea. (GO)
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good, or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. (GO)
It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes.
This is broadly true. But Heaven has the best choreographers. (GO)
... he rather liked people. It was a major failing in a demon.
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and they devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. (GO)
... he'd tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist. (GO)
It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe. (GO)
Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men. (GO)
Crowley liked the city in the early mornings. its population consisted almost entirely of people who had proper jobs to do and real reasons for being there, as opposed to the unnecessary millions who trailed in after 8 a.m. (GO)
She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not close up. (GO)
There are only two ways a child can go with a name like Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, and Pippin had chosen the other way ... (GO)
Notoriety wasn't as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity. (GO)
It would be a very accurate historian who could pinpoint the precise day when the Japanese changed from being fiendish automatons who copied everything from the West, to becoming skilled and cunning engineers who would leave the West standing. But the Wasabi had been designed on that one confused day, and combined the traditional bad points of most Western cars with a host of innovative disasters the avoidance of which had made firms like Honda and Toyota what they are today.
Newt had never actually seen another one on the road, despite his best efforts. For years, and without much conviction, he’d enthused to his friends about its economy and efficiency in the desperate hope that one of them might buy one, because misery loves company. (GO)
'... it's not enough to know what the future is. You have to know what it means.' (GO)
Courting is always difficult when the one being courted has an elderly female relative in the house; they tend to mutter or cackle or bum cigarettes or, in the worst cases, get out the family photograph album, an act of aggression in the sex war which ought to be banned by the Geneva Convention. (GO)
Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying:‘Learn, guys.' (GO)
Plan A hadn't worked. Plan B had failed. Everything depended on Plan C, and there was one drawback to this: he had only ever planned as far as B. (GO)
And she made sure that she had always put sprouts on to boil just before a séance. Nothing is more reassuring, nothing is more true to the comfortable spirit of English occultism, than the smell of Brussel sprouts cooking in the next room. (GO)
'Are you the owner of this establishment?' asked the fireman.
'Don't be stupid. Do I look like I run a bookshop?'
'I really wuldn't know that, sir. Appearances can be very deceptive. For example, I am a fireman. However, upon meeting me socially, people unaware of my occupation often suppose that I am, in fact, a chartered accountant or company director. Imagine me out of uniform, sir, and what kind of man would you see before you. Honestly?'
'A prat,' said Crowley and he ran into the bookshop. (GO)
'It’s not the travelling,’ said Black. ‘It’s the arriving that matters.' (GO)
In order to enhance the occult aspects of herself, Julia had begun to wear far too much handbeaten silver jewellery and
green eyeshadow. She felt she looked haunted and gaunt and romantic, and she would have, if she had lost another thirty pounds. She was convinced that she was anorexic, because every time she looked in the mirror she did indeed see a fat person. (GO)
Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you're in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice ... (GO)
'You don't have to make it work, anyway. You have to stop it working. You don't need knowledge for that, you need ignorance. (GO)
'It's hard enough bein' people as it is, without other people coming and messin' you around.' (GO)
'... I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people...' (GO)
'... if you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive.' (GO)
She was leaning against the doorframe, like an attractive yawn on legs. (GO)
Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants. (GO)
... all tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums. (GO)
Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for Exhibit A. (GO)
But you couldn't tell that to demons like Hastur and Ligur. Fourteenth century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly is was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldn't pick the buggers off one by one any more; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldn't understand. They'd never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example, of value-added tax. Or Manchester.
He'd been particularly pleased with Manchester. (GO)
That's how it goes, you think you’re on top of the world, and suddenly they spring Armageddon on you. (GO)
... when it came to avoiding going to church, the church he stolidly avoided going to was St. Cecil and All Angels, no-nonsense C of E, and he wouldn’t have dreamed of avoiding going to any other. (GO)
Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. (GO)
... Sister Mary was a nurse and nurses, whatever their creed, are primarily nurses, which had a lot to do with wearing your watch upside down, keeping calm in emergencies, and dying for a cup of tea. (GO)
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good, or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. (GO)
It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes.
This is broadly true. But Heaven has the best choreographers. (GO)
... he rather liked people. It was a major failing in a demon.
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and they devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. (GO)
... he'd tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist. (GO)
It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe. (GO)
Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men. (GO)
Crowley liked the city in the early mornings. its population consisted almost entirely of people who had proper jobs to do and real reasons for being there, as opposed to the unnecessary millions who trailed in after 8 a.m. (GO)
She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not close up. (GO)
There are only two ways a child can go with a name like Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, and Pippin had chosen the other way ... (GO)
Notoriety wasn't as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity. (GO)
It would be a very accurate historian who could pinpoint the precise day when the Japanese changed from being fiendish automatons who copied everything from the West, to becoming skilled and cunning engineers who would leave the West standing. But the Wasabi had been designed on that one confused day, and combined the traditional bad points of most Western cars with a host of innovative disasters the avoidance of which had made firms like Honda and Toyota what they are today.
Newt had never actually seen another one on the road, despite his best efforts. For years, and without much conviction, he’d enthused to his friends about its economy and efficiency in the desperate hope that one of them might buy one, because misery loves company. (GO)
'... it's not enough to know what the future is. You have to know what it means.' (GO)
Courting is always difficult when the one being courted has an elderly female relative in the house; they tend to mutter or cackle or bum cigarettes or, in the worst cases, get out the family photograph album, an act of aggression in the sex war which ought to be banned by the Geneva Convention. (GO)
Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying:‘Learn, guys.' (GO)
Plan A hadn't worked. Plan B had failed. Everything depended on Plan C, and there was one drawback to this: he had only ever planned as far as B. (GO)
And she made sure that she had always put sprouts on to boil just before a séance. Nothing is more reassuring, nothing is more true to the comfortable spirit of English occultism, than the smell of Brussel sprouts cooking in the next room. (GO)
'Are you the owner of this establishment?' asked the fireman.
'Don't be stupid. Do I look like I run a bookshop?'
'I really wuldn't know that, sir. Appearances can be very deceptive. For example, I am a fireman. However, upon meeting me socially, people unaware of my occupation often suppose that I am, in fact, a chartered accountant or company director. Imagine me out of uniform, sir, and what kind of man would you see before you. Honestly?'
'A prat,' said Crowley and he ran into the bookshop. (GO)
'It’s not the travelling,’ said Black. ‘It’s the arriving that matters.' (GO)
In order to enhance the occult aspects of herself, Julia had begun to wear far too much handbeaten silver jewellery and
green eyeshadow. She felt she looked haunted and gaunt and romantic, and she would have, if she had lost another thirty pounds. She was convinced that she was anorexic, because every time she looked in the mirror she did indeed see a fat person. (GO)
Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you're in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice ... (GO)
'You don't have to make it work, anyway. You have to stop it working. You don't need knowledge for that, you need ignorance. (GO)
'It's hard enough bein' people as it is, without other people coming and messin' you around.' (GO)
'... I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people...' (GO)
'... if you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive.' (GO)
She was leaning against the doorframe, like an attractive yawn on legs. (GO)
Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants. (GO)