Ian Tregillis Quotes & Sayings

It was the kind of place where hard drinkers came to wrestle their demons while fallen angels drank alone in dark smoky corners. — Ian Tregillis

The clockwork men and women fated to maneuver the oars twenty-four hours per day until the ship reached its destination had turned their silent voices to song as they bent their backs to row. They sang not in any human language but in the secret language of the mechanicals. A shanty sung in the click-tick-click of clockwork bodies, the crash of tapped feet, the clatter of metal hands gripping banded wooden spars. — Ian Tregillis

Winter had receded in recent days, as though resting — Ian Tregillis

Raindrops misted the Ridderzal's immense rosette window. Water dripped from the architectural tracery that turned the window into a stained glass cog. It streaked the colored panes of oculi and quatrefoils depicting the empire's arms: a rosy cross surrounded by the arms of the great families all girded by the teeth of the universal cog. — Ian Tregillis

For the creation of the mechanicals was a seismic event, an earth-rending convulsion that left nothing untouched: palaces, thrones, and empires, yes, but also the way men and women thought about themselves and their relationship to the world, to God, even their own bodies. — Ian Tregillis

You weaselly short-dicked elk-fucker. — Ian Tregillis

You greasy shit stain on a diseased elk's warty asshole. — Ian Tregillis

Nobody ever oohs and aahs over wiring conduits and sewer lines. — Ian Tregillis

A Power sidled into the diner.
Say what you will about them, but they know how to make an entrance. An inky shadow wrapped in a lashing rain of ash and sleet, it rode on 144,000 constantly flickering legs of forked lightning. This particular jasper's proper name was the basso profundo thrum of dark matter winging through the void, the fizz of neutrinos boiling off a moribund blue supergiant, and the bitter-tangerine taste of a quadrillion-dimension symmetry group. But I called it Sam for short. — Ian Tregillis

They had cut him open and excised his Free Will. — Ian Tregillis

Jesus's bloody tears. — Ian Tregillis

Someone had awoken METATRON: the Voice of God.
I knew that dame was trouble the minute I saw her. — Ian Tregillis

His wings, all six, shed embers of incandescent grace as he skidded across the night sky. And when he opened his mouths to scream, the Earth could do naught but shudder. — Ian Tregillis

See Cook [op.cit.] for a discussion of Huygens's unusual wartime visit to Cambridge and the Royal Society. His philosophical contretemps with Isaac Newton in 1675 (referenced in Society minutes as "The Great Corpuscular Debate") would mark the last significant intellectual discourse between England and the continent prior to the chaos of the Interregnum and the Annexation . . . Some Newton biographers [Winchester (1867), &c] indicate Huygens may have used his sojourn in Cambridge to access Newton's alchemical journals and that key insights derived thusly may have been instrumental to Huygens's monumental breakthrough. However, cf. Hooft [1909] and references therein for a critique of the forensic alchemy underlying this assertion. From Freeman, Thomas S., A History of the Pre-Annexation England from Hastings to the Glorious Revolution, 3 Vols. New Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1918. — Ian Tregillis

Oh, for crying out loud," she said. "Were you fools any more chivalrous I'd surely swoon on the spot and damage my uterus. — Ian Tregillis

Wait," he said. "Before we leave, can I, um, can I see what you really look like now?"

"Doofus. I look like your sister."

"I know. But there's more now. Right?"

It was a fair question. She said, "Okay. But you have to promise not to freak out. Just remember I'm still me, regardless of what it might look like."

"I promise."

And so it was there, in the reimagined and reconstructed memory of the kitchen she once shared with Ria, that Molly set aside her human form and showed her brother what she had become. The transition went more smoothly than it had in Bayliss's hotel room. She dialed it back when Martin flinched and shielded his eyes.

"Are you okay?" she asked, momentarily consumed with a vision of bloody tears streaking Bayliss's face.

"Oh, Moll," said Martin. He was crying. Not blood, though. "They turned you into starlight. — Ian Tregillis

The first encounter report had come from some weak-tea heiligenschein type charting the edges of the quantum information paradox in realities with anisotropic causalities. (Kids these days. Whatever happened to popping down to Earth to play burning bush to a roving band of shepherds?) — Ian Tregillis

Having tasted life without the pain of obligation perpetually burning him from within, he'd choose death over the return to bondage. He'd make that choice in an instant. Life as a slave was unspeakable; life as a slave who had briefly tasted freedom was unthinkable. — Ian Tregillis

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph on a bad-tempered camel. — Ian Tregillis

Magdalene's handjobs, — Ian Tregillis

Overwhelming: he could do anything he wanted. But the grand sum of anything-at-all was nothing-at-all. The topology of freedom offered no gradients to nudge him, no landmarks to guide him. — Ian Tregillis

Funny thing about Gabby: you wouldn't know it from looking at him, with his golden halo and platonic beauty, but the guy was something of a pack rat. He'd been collecting little odds and ends since at least the double-digit redshifts. The interior reality of Gabriel's Magisterium burbled and shifted like convection currents in a star on the zaftig end of the main sequence. Because, I realized, that's what they were. Dull dim light, from IR to X-ray, oozed past me like the wax in a million-mile lava lamp while carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen nuclei did little do-si-dos about my toes. Every bubble, every sizzle, every new nucleus, every photodissociation tagged something of interest to Gabriel. The heart of this star smelled of roses and musty libraries. — Ian Tregillis

I'll say this for the celestial spheres, though: great acoustics. We're talking Platonic ideals here. Pythagoras would have smashed his corny little harp across his knee if he'd heard it. — Ian Tregillis

Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony. — Ian Tregillis

But he couldn't suppress the horror of learning his pursuers would murder innocents to bolster their lies. — Ian Tregillis

Enochian was the wail of dying stars, the whisper of galaxies winging through the void, the gurgle of primordial oceans, the crackle of a cooling planet,
the thunder of creation. And beneath it all , a simmering undercurrent of malevolence. — Ian Tregillis

Fire became an emerald mist where it touched his flesh. Its smoke smelled of cinnamon and sulfur, and tasted like pickled starlight. "Did you leave," she asked, "or were you kicked out?" "Don't get cute. I left," said Bayliss. He muttered, "I really wish somebody had given old Milton a sock in the kisser when they'd had the chance. — Ian Tregillis

The Stemwinders made the most bizarre ratcheting sound, like the stripping of gears combined with the metallic whine of an overstressed steel cable. — Ian Tregillis

The Pleroma is the totality. The superset. Magisteria are the subsets." Eat your heart out, Bertrand Russell. "We all have one. Even you. Your own little slice of the divine. — Ian Tregillis

Is it beautiful?"
"Really weird. But don't get hung up on the angels. They're mostly assholes. — Ian Tregillis

The prosperity achieved through slavery had a way of blinding men's hearts to the evil of their own hands. — Ian Tregillis

A cork isn't useful unless you have a place to put it. — Ian Tregillis

After spitting a long dark stream of tobacco through the crenelle he shouted, "You short-dicked baboons are making the Blessed Virgin cry! Haven't you shitlickers ever heard of foreplay? Fucking Christ, be gentle with that bastard. This isn't some dockside whore you're paying by the minute, you fools!" Seeing that his gentle encouragements had delivered the intended effect, the sergeant returned to his knitting. — Ian Tregillis

What point in having the freedom to enter into promises of your own choosing, to forge bonds of your own design, if your only aim is to shatter them? — Ian Tregillis

humans carried heavy obligations, too, but called them culture. Society. — Ian Tregillis

Jesus Christ on a six-day wine bender. — Ian Tregillis

Christ on a pus-dripping syphilitic camel, — Ian Tregillis

Terrifying: Jax remembered what had happened to the last Clakker to say no. They'd broken his legs, and filled his mouth with glue, and tossed him into the hellish forges of the Clockmakers' Guild. The humans had destroyed the rogue Clakker Adam, who'd been born Perjumbellagostriavantus, and made a public spectacle of it. Practically declared a citywide holiday. They had called him rogue and demon-thrall, melted his body to an alchemical slurry, and incinerated his hard-won soul until there was nothing left of it but a shiver in the spines of the human voyeurs.
Rogue. That's what they'd call Jax too, if they caught him. They'd condemn, damn, torture, and melt him. — Ian Tregillis

How did humans guide themselves? How did they know what to do and what not to do? — Ian Tregillis

The wind fluttering the pennants atop the outer keep and teasing Berenice's hair carried the loamy smell of damp earth, the fresh scent of the river, and, even now, a ghostly chemical astringency. The miasma wafted from the battlefield. — Ian Tregillis

Then she rooted around until she found the bathroom medicine cabinet. It used to contain a bottle of aspirin. Now it contained her scream from the time she was bitten by a llama at a roadside petting zoo in Manitoba. — Ian Tregillis