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Book: The Nightmare Stacks
Quotes of Book: The Nightmare Stacks
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  1. Charles Stross _ The Nightmare Stacks

    there's a point at which sufficient incompetence is malice.
    book-quote

  2. Charles Stross _ The Nightmare Stacks

    Organizations are not human beings and they don't obey the same priorities. They're hives. Like the bank you worked for, I suppose, but you were too specialized, working at too low a level to see the politics going on around you. Hives run on emergent consensus and policy.
    book-quote

  3. Charles Stross _ The Nightmare Stacks

    Autarchies had been shattered, hermit kingdoms destroyed. Almost a billion had died in war, plague, starvation, and madness. But worse was yet to come, as what passed for civilization on this world guttered and faded beneath the penumbra of a darkness deeper than eternal night.
    book-quote

  4. Charles Stross _ The Nightmare Stacks

    Cassie believes that she is Agent First of Spies and Liars, daughter of the former General-Overseer of the 14th Western Host of Air and Darkness, who is now the All-Highest of the Morningstar Empire {or what remains of it, all other claimants to that status having been crushed by the ancient horrors that ate the moon}. But at the same time she is also Cassiopeia Brewer,
    book-quote

  5. Charles Stross _ The Nightmare Stacks

    The morning after her date with her nerdishly cute prince of darkness, Cassie is scheduled for a lecture at nine o'clock. She blows it off because life's too short and anyway the world is going to end in about two weeks' time, when the Second Heavy Cavalry Brigade rumbles into town accompanied by skies that rain wyrmfire and the death spells of combat magi.
    book-quote

  6. Charles Stross _ The Nightmare Stacks

    Everything he's learned about the Civil Service tells him that having tea poured for you is one of the ferociously guarded signifiers of rank, like the grade of paintings from the Government Art Collection hung on your office wall, or the quality of your carpet.
    book-quote

  7. Charles Stross _ The Nightmare Stacks

    Brains mouses over one of the images.
    book-quote

  8. Charles Stross _ The Nightmare Stacks

    Shut up. Stand up. Put this on. That's right . . . if you were the kind of man who found it easy to do that kind of thing do you think I'd bother with you?" Her question takes him by surprise, rattling his introspective daze.
    book-quote

  9. Charles Stross _ The Nightmare Stacks

    since the draw-down in forces triggered by the 2010 defense review, the units the Laundry can draw upon have been depleted. There are now just two SAS squadrons, 120 men in total, to cover all contingencies: and only half of them are available at any given time. If the shit really hits the fan they can draw on the regular Army and the Air Force for support, but there will be delays in getting everyone up to speed.
    book-quote

  10. Charles Stross _ The Nightmare Stacks

    the strongest manacles are born in the blood.
    book-quote

  11. Charles Stross _ The Nightmare Stacks

    you've got to learn to think like a state if you work in the Civil Service. Organizations are not human beings and they don't obey the same priorities. They're hives.
    book-quote

  12. Charles Stross _ The Nightmare Stacks

    Or was it running the world's weirdest Turing-complete variant Dungeons & Dragons campaign using a rule set isomorphic with first-order transdimensional summoning algebra-
    book-quote
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