Laundry Quotes - page 4
Ed walked away from the program feeling fortified and stapled. His brain was buzzing, the way it always did just after Jeopardy! He loaded up the microbus with Atlases and poseidons and headed for Pope County. "I've had it," he sang. "I've had it with puns, alliteration, Russian literature, Italian neorealism, meaningless cross-references, and laundry lists of nonsense. I shall drive without a license, without clothing, without direction, and if I make it to Arkansas, fine, and if I'm running late, if I'm running a numbers game, it doesn't matter, I shall keep on running. Yes, this is the answer. This is the ending. I shall keep on running, because a body in motion tends to stay emotional, and it's better to feel. Pain is better than emptiness, emptiness is better than nothing, and nothing is better than this."
John S. Hall
I would say people will want to watch the younger lot rather than me. We need to give them more time. It will be a little harsh to put them aside. They are working in a much more competitive climate. They are working with many more disadvantages than perhaps we were. The audiences too, are not as tolerant as they were in my time. I think the audience gave me a lot of breathing space. I made mistakes and kept trying to rectify them in film after film. It takes a while to do away with the soiled laundry.
Amitabh Bachchan
The Laundry is the British Government's secret agency for dealing with "magic.” The use of scare-quotes is deliberate; as Sir Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” so "magic” is what we deal with. Note that this does not involve potions, pentacles, prayers, eldritch chanting, dressing up in robes and pointy hats, or most (but not all) of the stuff associated with the term in the public mind. No, our magic is computational. The realm of pure mathematics is very real indeed, and the...things...that cast shadows on the walls of Plato's cave can sometimes be made to listen and pay attention if you point a loaded theorem at them. This is, however, a very dangerous process, because most of the shadow-casters are unclear on the distinction between pay attention and free buffet lunch here. My job-applied computational demonologist-comes with a very generous pension scheme, because most of us don't survive to claim it.
Charles Stross
