Tom Holt

Quotes

1. Like fish, accountants see things in a different way from people, and details which people find unimportant are their reason for existing.

   p. 23

2. 

   “You’re Loge, aren’t you? It’s odd. I was frightened of you when I thought you were the taxman, but now you turn out to be a God, I’m not frightened at all.

   p. 105

3. 

   “Be my guest,” Vanderdecker said. “You can watch a master liar at work, if you don't mind being an accomplice.”

   “Doesn't worry me,” Jane replied, “I’m an accountant.”

   p. 113

4. 

   He knew of course that there was such a thing as love, and that if you happen to come across it, as most people seem to do, it is not a thing that you can avoid, or that you should want to avoid. But you cannot go out and find it, because it is not that sort of creature. The phrase “to fall in love,” he realized, is a singularly apt one; it is something you blunder into, like a pothole. Very like a pothole.

   p. 210

5. 

   And so you give this irregularity in your minds a name of its own. You call it Love, which is meant to make everything all right. Rather than try and sort it out or find a vaccine, you go out of your way to glorify it. I mentioned your art and your poetry just now. What are your favorite themes? Love and War. The two things that any species can do, and which most species do much more sensibly than you lot—screwing and killing—are the things you humans single out to make a song and dance about. Literally.

   p. 160

6. 

   It was, she admitted to herself as she parked in front of the boatyard, a long shot, a hunch – or, if you preferred English to the language of the talking pictures, a very silly idea.

   p. 99

7. 

   I see what you mean about making a will, actually, although I still maintain that forty quid spent on deciding what's going to happen after you're dead is a waste of good beer money.

   p. 193

8. 

   You see, the last thing my daughter wants is to be happy. She’d hate it. No, what she wants is to be finally, definitively unhappy, and for it all to be my fault. It’d finally confirm all her dearest illusions about how her life has been ruined. People like that would far rather be right than happy.

   p. 133

9. 

   Well, it's a bit late now, isn't it? Besides, I never could be doing with lawyers. Did you ever meet a lawyer whose life you would willingly have saved in the event of fire? Not me.

   p. 193

10. 

    It was irritating to have one’s physical shortcomings pointed out quite so plainly twice in one evening, once by a beautiful girl and once by a dying badger.

    p. 3

11. 

    “I’m afraid you're stuffed, Professor. Talking of which, have an olive.”

    “I do not want an olive, Miss Doland.”

    “More fool you, then,” Jane replied. “It's at times like these you need an olive in order to make sense of things.”

    p. 221

12. 

    An over-excited accountant, like the University of Hull, is a contradiction in terms.

    p. 188