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You make a plan without intelligence—you might as well not have a plan at all.

“Are there aliens?” Simon asks Indigo.

“Not that I know of,” she says. “Unless you count cats.”

Alone; it was the one active passion I had left now, the only real obsession. I had acquired, I hoped, with the passage of the years, the bad years, a measure of patience, and I thought of myself as being somewhat tight-mouthed, and even persevering, virtues I had always so conspicuously lacked, and I thought the time was at last gone when I had exhausted myself with futile rebellions. The rebellions seemed now, from this cool distance, this slight eminence I had achieved, silly and wasteful, and it was cunning that now struck me as the valuable quality to have, the distinctive characteristic. There had been so much blind impetuosity in the past; there had been so many indiscriminate wounds inflicted; I had lacerated myself as well as others so unhappily so many times. Now I fought, or it seemed to me I was fighting, a much sounder although a much more limited and more circumspect war: it consisted mostly of careful withdrawals, of very conscious retreats.

If you run everywhere you miss stuff that you might have been better off noticing—just saying.

None of those choices seemed likely, but if I’ve learned one thing on the job, it is that a coincidence can kill someone just as easily as malice.

Did she know what it was for a man to come to that point in his life when he found it impossible to touch the body of his own wife? To look at it; and to feel nothing. Not to desire it, at all, when the flesh was inert and dead and meaningless? To have the act of love become (with one's own wife) the most meaningless of all acts?

“Isn’t the internet wonderful?” she said. “Better than dragons any day.”

But this was the eighteenth century, when life was cheap and ambition unlimited.

“Giant squids are pretty alien,” I said.

“Not to another giant squid,” said Beverley.

This is what’s known as operational flexibility, and definitely not making it up as you go along.

There was a noisy rush of water from the bathroom, and she appeared, ready for the evening, a smile she had chosen, I thought, from a small collection of smiles she kept for occasions like this, fixed upon her face.

Dr. Walid’s theory was that the news media and their consumers unconsciously shied away from events that didn’t fall within the narrow band of their expectations. Shot by a jealous lover or stabbed by a body were narratives they could run with. Killed in an unspecified manner with no witnesses, no CCTV, and no obvious motive probably piqued their curiosity, but would it get clicks or sell papers? More importantly, would it fit the news agenda their organization worked to?