Warren Ellis

“She's really married?" Tallow said to Bat."Yeah. Talia's like this Scandinavian Amazon who can break rocks with her boobs. She could fit Scarly in her armpit. Sometimes I think she likes Scarly just because she was the most portable lesbian available.”

“Where's the elevator?" Mike asked, sheathing his weapon. Tallow felt a little better telling Mike there wasn't an elevator and watching his face. But then Mike picked up the dolly, boxes and all, with one hand, took the kit bag from Sophie with the other, and started jogging up the stairs with"Third floor, right?""There," said Scarly, "goes a man who has names for all his muscles.""I was just thinking that," Tallow said. "Serious gym rat.""No, I mean he's named all his muscles. That's a man who calls one of his muscles Steve.”

“Tallow turned the corner into Bat and Scarly's office to be greeted by a large plastic robot on the bench waving its arms and shouting, "Say hello to my l'il frien'" in an electronically processed voiced as a small plastic penis repeatedly jabbed out from its groin on a short metal piston.Bat emerged from behind the thing. "Don't judge me," he said. "I got bored.”

“Tallow walked into Bat and Scarly's office to find Bat slumped on a chair with his head on the workbench, turned away from the door, while Scarly softly sharpened on old straight razor on a worn strop, watching her partner intently. "I don't think he needs his eyebrows, do you? I mean, they don't serve an immediate function or anything," she whispered.”

“The ECTs are moving the guns in small batches," Bat said. "We're making them take so many photos that one of them asked if she was being trained to shoot porno.”

“He tried to close a hand around the precious coffee but had to jerk his fingers away, sharply enough that his wrist popped painfully. Tallow wondered if the other end of the coffee machine was slurping water out of a lake in Hell.”

“Detective John Tallow, 1st Precinct.""You," said Scarly. "I hate you so much my dick is hard.”

“Tallow was nervously aware that his name was on the worse cold-case dump CSU had ever seen. He was not looking forward to having them look at him and judge by eye exactly how much his organs might be worth on the black market.”

“I partnered you with Jim all those years ago because you were complimentary kinds of crazy. You kept each other in check. I need you to not crawl back inside your own skull and watch the world with binoculars from deep cover.”

“From his vantage, three steps back and to the right, Tallow could see Rosato's eye a good five inches outside Rosato's head and still attached to his eye socket by a mess of red worms. In that single second, Tallow abstractedly realized that in his last moment of life, James Rosato could see his killer from two different angles.”

“Jim Rosato was recently married, to a Greek nurse. Rosato was half Irish and half Italian, and there was a pool on at the 1st as to which of the two would arrive at work wearing the other's skin as a hat within the year.”

“Bat stood in the open door and said "I am a crime scene unit detective from the New York City Police Department, you heinous fucking mongoloid, and there is nothing I cannot do.”

“Fuck me", Bat gasped, "It’s like an angel shat ice cream coffee rainbows in my mouth.”

“Flows of shit» , muttered Bat, «I’d go insane, listening to that all day. It’s just a river of ‘Hey, this crazy, disgusting thing just happened, and hey, here’s another one, and another, and another, has your brain caught fire yet?’ It’s like disaster porn or something.”

“Our guy has a property office, John. And I don't mean the Property Office here in One PP. I mean the huge fucking storage facility. A guy in there, with access to thousands of fucking handguns. Even the ones that other people would be keeping an eye on, like Son of Sam's piece, for fuck's sake - a guy in there who'll just boost them and give them to our guy to kill people with. And if the guns are too famous, he'll cut his own slugs out of the bodies and walk away. This guy, our guy, he's actually starting to scare me a bit right now.""A couple of hundred kills to his name didn't do that?""Meh. I dream about killing two hundred people every fucking night.""You know," said Tallow, "whenever I'm in danger of forgetting you're CSU, you always find a way to remind me.”

“The two guys who ran the place, always in Williamsburg hipster uniforms of short-sleeved shirts and neatly trimmed beards that looked stuck on with spirit gum, paid, as ever, no attention to anything but the food and the money. Tallow imagined that every night they counted their money and prided themselves on having not made eye contact with anything human.”

“The elevator doors opened to reveal a very large man brandishing a bloodstained antique phone receiver in a plastic bag and proclaiming, "I found this up him!""You know," said Tallow, "I really have no response to that.”

“Of course I don't care if you're bleeding! I'm fucking autistic!”

“There ain't enough happens in soccer. It's like watching twenty-two hair models kick a ball around for what seems like six months and then one of them falls over and the ball goes in the goal.”

“I'm sorry. Is that too harsh an observation for you? Does that sound too much like the Truth? Fuck you. If anyone in this shithole city gave two tugs of a dead dog's cock about Truth, this wouldn't be happening.”

“If anyone in this shithole city gave two tugs of a dead dog's cock about Truth, this wouldn't be happening.”

“Why do I even have to say this? Why do I have to say "Get off the unique and probably alien living plinth that zaps the unwary?" What is wrong with my life that I have to say these things out loud...?”

“Cheap! But not as cheap as your girlfriend.”

“What if I left my memory in the future and I have to catch up to it?”

“Wolves ate even mighty hunters, for there was no honor or code among predators, and everyone's guts steam the same way when torn open on a cold night.”

“You know what it's like, finding eight middle-aged guys having tantric sex with ostriches?”

“At the departure gate, a drunken airport security woman was handing out box cutters to the passengers.”

“Ah, Hollywood. One day, you and I will play Operation. And I'll be the drunk, mad doctor with the hedge trimmer & you will wear the straps”

“If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it”

“Don't live with writers. Writers are bastards.”

“The two most dangerous things in the world are rich people and crazy people. The Roanokes are rich like pharoahs and crazier'n a snake-fucking baby.”

“Shopping for clothes is a Boyfriend Thing. You stand around and look blankly at a bunch of pieces of fabric and you look at the price tags and you wonder how something that'd barely cover your right nut can cost the price of a kidney and you watch the shop assistants check you out and wonder what you're doing with her because she's cute and you're kind of funny-looking and she tries clothes on and you look at her ass in a dozen different items that all look exactly the same and let's face it you're just looking at her ass anyway and it all blurs together and then someone sticks a vacuum cleaner in your wallet and vacuums out all the cash and you leave the store with one bag so small that mice couldn't fuck in it. Repeat a dozen times or until the front of your brain dies.”

“I wish I still had that photo.”

“Elijah Snow: 'Who have you pissed off this time, John?'John Stone: 'Sumatran robot death sluts -- Dammit, ONE of these buttons fires the atomic death biter --”

“That means that the universe is two-dimensional. Matter, energy, time, you, me and the floor are holograms.”

“Think about it; the quicktank is given a job most of us would laugh out of town. Build a sophisticated camera capable of full 3-D input and peripheral pickup, using only water and jelly.Build an eye.”

“Magic is the cheat codes for the world.”

“You know what they say; if you're tired of London, you're tired of life.”

“Every law that curbs my basic human freedom; every lie about the things I care for; every crime committed against me by their politics; that what's makes me get up and hound these fuckers, and I'll do that until the day I die... or until my brain dries up or something.”

“You think that drinking with a serial killer takes you into the midnight currents of the culture? I say bullshit. There's been twelve TV documentaries, three movies and eight books about me. I'm more popular than any of these designed-by-pedophile pop moppets littering the music television and the gossip columns. I've killed more people than Paris Hilton has desemenated, I was famous before she was here and I'll be famous after she's gone. I am the mainstream. I am, in fact, the only true rock star of the modern age. Every newspaper in America never fails to report on my comeback tours, and I get excellent reviews.”

“He'd always liked women who'd talk back to him just a little bit. "Girls with balls" were good. Women with an actual mind of their own who could prove him wrong in something were, of course, castrating bitches who should be drowned in bottomless wells.”

“Dance like you're stamping on a human face forever, love like you've been in a serious car crash that minced the front of your brain, stab like no one can arrest you, and live like there's no such thing as God.”

“Tradition:' one of those words conservative people use as a shortcut to thinking.”

“I remember first learning about death quite vividly.I'm not sure how old I was, but I remember the conversation like it was yesterday. My grandfather had died, and my mother was trying to explain it to me.'Sometimes, when someone gets ill, and they're very very old, they don't get better again. They just get iller and iller and then... then their body stops working.''I don't understand.''What's in them just goes away, and doesn't come back.''Grandpa isn't coming back?''No,' she said. 'Not ever again.''Grandpa said he was going away and not ever coming back after he held Grandma's head in that cotton-dump outside of town and kicked Skeeter seventy-three times.''Grandpa was very drunk. That's not the same as being dead. Grandpa's dead, son. He's not there anymore.'And I remember saying, 'Hold everything right fucking THERE.'You went to all the trouble of conceiving me, and giving birth to me, and raising me and feeding me and clothing me and all-- and, YEAH, whipping me from time to time, and making me live in a house that's freezing fucking cold all the goddamn time-- and you make me cry and things hurt so much and disappointments crush my heart every day and I can't do half the things I want to do and sometimes I just want to scream-- and what I've got to look forward to is my body breaking and something flipping off the switch in my head-- I go through all this-- and then there's death?'What is the motherfucking deal here?”

“Here in Britain, of course, it's Thank Fuck We Got Those Weird Jesus Bastards On The Boat Day”

“...You people don't know what the truth is! It's there, just under their bullshit, but you never look! That's what I hate most about this fucking city-- LIES ARE NEWS AND TRUTH IS OBSOLETE!”

“I want vasopressin, washed caffeine, Jumpstart, ginkgo biloba, guarana, and any intelligence enhancer introduced in the last five years.”

“I was having a mildly paranoid day, mostly due to the fact that the mad priest lady from over the river had taken to nailing weasels to my front door again.”

“Bugger this. I want a better world.”

“You want to know about voting. I'm here to tell you about voting. Imagine you're locked in a huge underground night-club filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pitbulls for fun. And you ain't allowed out until you all vote on what you're going to do tonight. You like to put your feet up and watch "Republican Party Reservation". They like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns, and brand new sexual organs you did not even know existed. So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as your eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades. That's voting. You're welcome.”