Tom Holt

From The Portable Door by Tom Holt (Orbit, 2003):

[...] "Actually," he said, "I don't like her at all, she's rude and offhand and does nothing but put me down all the time. But --"
Neville dipped his head gravely. "Danny Corbett syndrome," he diagnosed. "You remember Danny Corbett?" he went on, as Paul raised a dubious eyebrow. "Little fat kid with red hair and freckles, nearly got slung out in fourth year for filling Werewolf Dave's coat pockets with aerosol cream during a maths test."
"Oh, him," Paul conceded. "What's he got to do with it?"
"Well," Neville said, dabbing his moustache on his cuff, "I don't know if you remember Fiona Mascetti -- big girl, went on to be a mechanic in the Royal Engineers...
"Mphm."
"Quite. Once seen, never forgotten, though I gather these days she's reckoned to be the fastest mole wrench east of Aldershot. Anyhow, Danny and Fiona went out for a while, and to hear either of them talk, the other one was the most disgusting, revolting specimen of humanity who ever evolved from a red-arsed monkey. Fiona reckoned Danny reminded her of a slug that's been left out in the rain and gone rusty, Danny was always wondering why the hell he bothered with a girl who could eat two cream doughnuts simultaneously and still not stop talking." He sighed. "They got married in June," he said, "and they're expecting their first kid in April."
"Oh," Paul said. "I see what you mean, I guess. Still, that's neither here nor there. All the more reason for me to clear out of there, if I was being sensible."
Neville lit a cigarette. "Up to you," he said. "Far as I can tell, victims of Danny Corbett syndrome tend to make out all right in the long run. My guess is, if the other party annoys the hell out of you from day one, it makes for a smooth, well-balanced relationship, because that way you sort of fast-forward through the dopey, sun-shines-out-of-his-or-her-backside phase and get to the mutually-assured-irritation stage that seems to be the default setting for all long-term human couplings, without any of the disillusionment and disappointment that everybody else's got to get through first. I mean, if you know the significant other is a monumental pain in the bum right from the starter's gun, you're spared all the pain of finding it out once you've been together for two years and spent good money on kitchen units and curtains.
Paul nodded. "Talking of which," he said, "where is Melanie this evening?"
"Friday's her karate class," Neville replied. "She's doing pretty well, apparently. She was telling me the other day, she's learned forty-six different places on the human body where an accurately placed drop kick will cause instant death."
"You must be very proud."
Neville inclined his head in agreement. "Last month it was A-level Spanish," he said. [...]
[Chapter 3, p. 48-50]
[...] "I"m really sorry," he said, with all the sincerity he could muster. "You must be feeling awful."
She shrugged. "A bit," she said. "I mean, yes, I did like him, quite a lot at one point, but I always got the feeling that when we were together I wasn't really being me, if you follow me; I mean, I wasn't being the me I wanted to be, I was being the me he wanted me to be, or at least the me he thought I wanted to be; and I was trying to want to be the me he thought I wanted to be, for his sake, and neither of us was being ourselves, so we could never really be us, in a together sort of a way, and so it was all really pretty pointless, for me and for him. Do you see what I mean?"
"Yes," Paul lied. "It must've been pretty miserable for you." [...]
[Chapter 3, p. 70]
[...] "All right," he said, reappearing through the fire door, "come on in, I"ll lock up behind you. You'd better go straight to your office."
As he headed up the corridor, Paul heard the three locks graunch behind him. [...]
[Chapter 4, p. 77]
[...] he hadn't established anything, hadn't come away with a signed contract or something he could take to the bank. A slight thaw, maybe, an IOU for a few friendly words or a smile, redeemable at an unspecified future date, written on rice paper in invisible ink. Some people -- most people, for all he knew -- did this sort of thing every day; made friends, established goodwill, maybe planted the seed of affection, without even trying or knowing they were doing it. Some people, most people, but not him, he thought [...]
[Chapter 3, p. 67]
How'd you get on with the computer?"
She sat down. "No luck," she said. "Actually, their computers are pretty weird. I mean, they aren't Windows or anything like that, or even Unix or Mac; it's some other system I"ve never seen before. There isn't even a mouse. To be honest," she went on, "I haven't got a clue how it works. I sat there for ages trying to figure it out, but hitting the keys didn't seem to do anything; I thought it'd frozen or something. But then I was sitting there staring at the screen, wondering what to do, and suddenly these menus dropped down, with all the open files and launch browser things on them; and -- well, this is going to sound a bit strange, but as soon as I looked at something and thought, I wonder what that one does, there it was on the screen, just like --" She stopped abruptly, and Paul guessed she'd been about to use the M word, but shied away from it at the last moment. "Just like that," she said. "Anyhow, once I stopped trying to figure out how it worked and simply got on with it, I didn't have any trouble at all."
This didn't mean a great deal to Paul, who firmly believed that all computers worked by magic, and not the sort of magic that was safe to have around the house, at that. For all he knew, the system she'd just described was a vintage trilby as far as Silicon Valley was concerned. [...]
[Chapter 4, p. 90]
"We need that long stapler," Sophie pointed out.
Paul nodded. "I"ll go and see if I can find it," he said, with all the enthusiasm of Captain Oates taking a stroll through the permafrost.
To his surprise, he didn't have far to look. He'd decided to make a detour by way of the coffee room; and when he opened the cupboard where the sugar lived, there it was.
"How did it get in there?" Sophie asked, when he'd told her about his mission.
"Oh, you know what it's like," he replied. "You put something down in this place, next minute it's gone and it doesn't turn up for weeks. Probably a spatio-temporal anomaly or a vergence in the Force."
"Or people taking stuff and not putting it back when they've finished with it," Sophie said disapprovingly.
"Possibly," Paul replied sceptically, "but maybe a trifle far-fetched. Sod, it's out of staples."
[Chapter 5, p. 113]
On his way home, Paul stopped at a bank machine and checked his balance. The month's money had gone in. He was solvent beyond the dreams of avarice (though in his case, avarice was a light sleeper). [...]
[Chapter 6, p. 137]
Duncan and Jenny, in Paul's opinion, summed up nearly everything that was wrong with the world. Not individually; he'd known Duncan for close on a decade, they'd built model Spitfires and discussed minutiae of Romulan uniforms together back in the days when womankind was still no more than a dark cloud on the distant horizon, while Jenny was small, lively, clever, pretty and legitimately but not culpably blonde, and played a slick game of nomination whist. It was as a unit, a union of soul and flesh, that they got up Paul's nose to the point where their heads were all but sticking out of his ears. Duncan had met Jenny two years ago at a New Year's party, and ever since then they'd been tack-welded together, a fusion of two quite reasonable human beings into a single nauseating entity. Paul had heard any number of horror stories about so-and-so who got himself fixed up and thereafter disappeared without trace into a black pit of soft furnishings, mortgages and early-morning feeds but, regrettably, that wasn't the case where Duncan and Jenny were concerned. Faster than a high-bandwidth download, Jenny had learned to play bar billiards, distinguish real ale from keg, form opinions about TV sci-fi and football, and eat fish and chips standing on the Embankment at half past eleven at night. At first Paul had assumed this was simple protective mimicry or, more likely, the predator merging with the shadows as it stalked her prey down the narrow, dark path that led to a serious talk about relationships and commitment. Two years later, he was forced to the conclusion that Duncan was either blackmailing God or very, very lucky, and the whole set-up was for real. Hence his feelings of profound distaste whenever he spent time with the gestalt. It's bad enough having to watch a fellow human being enjoying unalloyed, undeserved good fortune. When the lucky bastard is a close personal friend, it's unbearable.
[Chapter 6, p. 138-139]
[...] she was sitting on a trunk (Item 445, containing, according to the red book, the uniform worn by General Raglan at the battle of Balaclava), staring at the door and humming softly under her breath. He'd had occasion to notice before that she could carry a tune to the same extent that lobsters can pilot transat-lantic airliners. Not that he minded, in fact he'd made a conscious decision that it was endearing. [...]
[Chapter 7, p. 176]
"[...] And I met this bloke."
"Really?"
"Yes." Suddenly Sophie swung round and looked at him. Her face was blank, but her eyes were shining. "His name's Shaz and he does anarcho-socialist ceramics as a performance art, and he lives in an old bus in a field near Esher, and we talked for hours about all sorts of stupid stuff, and, well, I think I like him a lot." She stopped abruptly, then went on. "I know, it's really like stupid and girly, because I"ve got to tell someone, and really I haven't got a clue if we're going to have a relationship or not, we haven't talked about it or anything, but I think it's sort of likely that we probably will, I don't know. Anyway," she added, "you don't mind me telling you, do you? [...]"
"No," said Paul's voice, "not at all. Um, great," Paul's voice added. "Congratulations, I guess."
She shrugged, but with great vigour. "Oh, it's way too early for that," she said. "I mean, yes, we talked for hours and hours, but then he and a bunch of his friends were going to drive to Stonehenge and watch the sunrise in his bus, and he asked did I want to go too, but I said no, I had to get up for work in the morning, but he said that was all right, like he really didn't mind, which was really good, I thought, like not making demands or anything. But anyway, he mentioned he was doing a performance tonight at a pub out Denmark Hill way and he said I could come along if I felt like it, so I said yes, all right. So that's all, really."
"Great," said Paul's voice, sounding like it was coming from a very long way away. "Well, I hope everything, um, I hope it all goes okay. Have a nice time, I mean. And it's Saturday tomorrow, so you don't have to get up early --" He made a promise to himself to smack himself round the face with a brick for saying that, as soon as conveniently possible. "Well, great," he said. "Hope it all works out for you."
[...]
"So," he heard himself saying, "he's into pottery, then? Interesting."
"Ceramics," she corrected sharply. "What he does, it's more like conceptual than, well, useful or anything. He told me all about it. Apparently he learned most of it from a tribe of Tuareg nomads in North Africa, and now he's applying for a Lottery grant so he can evolve the interactive side of it, hopefully with multimedia and the Internet. Then he's hoping to go to New Guinea, apparently they've got a really exciting tradition of conceptual ceramics there, based around this stuff they use, it's sort of like a mixture of straw ash, volcanic lava and pig manure, which he wants to try and incorporate into his own work at a fundamental level. But, of course, that all depends on the grants position, so it's not settled yet."
[...]
"Great," he said. "So, how long's he been doing this?"
"About five years," she said. "As a performance thing, anyway. He started on the pottery ages ago, while he was still in prison. Then he was two years in North Africa after that, and six months in Finland learning to be a shaman, so all told it's quite a long time, really."
"I see," Paul said. "He's probably pretty good at it by now, then."
"Oh, yes," Sophie said. "Well, I haven't actually seen any of his stuff, but he showed me a couple of albums of photos, and it all looked really amazing."
"Right," Paul said. "And that was without the performance, presumably."
She nodded. [...]
[Chapter 7, p. 177-179]
[Sophie] opened her bag [...] and produced a fat A-format paperback; Slipware Against Franco, he read sideways, Ceramic Trends During The Spanish Civil War. The fact that she put it away again five minutes later without even marking her place was the best thing that'd happened to him all day.
[Chapter 10, p. 282]
Paul had believed in the existence of six a.m. for many years, just as he'd always believed in the yeti and the Loch Ness monster; in the same way, he'd always devoutly hoped that he'd never have to confront any of them face to face.
[Chapter 10, p. 277]
Paul's heart sank like an over-insured stone. [...]
[Chapter 12, p. 319]

From In Your Dreams by Tom Holt (Orbit, 2005):

It’s not true that it’s easier to get from Bokhara to Tashkent on a three-legged camel than to travel from the City to Kentish Town by bus. It just seems that way, particularly when you’re in a hurry. Paul had found out long before that magic doesn’t work on traffic jams (implying, rather disturbingly, that traffic in Central London is meant to be permanently gridlocked), so he spent the journey fretting and looking at his watch, which if anything appeared to be running backwards. His idea had been to get home before Sophie did, tidy the flat, do the washing-up, cook dinner and generally impress her with his caring, responsible side. After dinner, he’d smear a solemn look onto his face and suggest that it was time they had a Serious Talk about Us, which would please her no end; Us was probably her favourite topic of conversation, and although generally speaking he tended to lose the thread after the first few minutes, it never seemed to matter, so long as he agreed with everything she said and maintained eye contact. That was the plan; a sort of pre-emptive apology for whatever it was he’d done, or was about to do, wrong. Unfortunately, infuriatingly, it looked like sixty thousand cars had sworn to stop him or die trying.
[Chapter 1, p. 25-26]
Paul had no idea what hit him, though his best guess would have been either a brick or a chunk of stone. Whatever it was, it connected with the point of his left elbow, and it packed a solid punch. He couldn't hear himself scream over the clatter and thump of flying masonry, but he was fairly sure he had, and why not? If God hadn't meant us to scream, he wouldn't have given us horrendous pain.
[Chapter 6, p. 167]
"[...] Only," she added, "your honest-to-God psycho enjoys killing 'cos he likes the blood or the screams or whatever, and that's not really the case with most of the heroes I've met; and I've met plenty, believe me. There's no real malice in them, no rage or anything like that. They just like the swirly capes and the white stallions and the jewel-hilted swords."
"Ah," Paul said. "More in Zorro than in anger, you mean?" Mr Tanner's mum sighed. "You want to walk back to London from here, you carry on. I'm trying to have a serious conversation."
[Chapter 6, p. 173]
Suddenly, Paul felt very tired. "Humour me," he said. "Look, if you care enough about this person to kill me, surely it's not too much trouble just to say her name. Right?"
Silence. You can sometimes gauge the flavour of silences by how long they last. In this case, it tasted like embarrassment.
"We can't," said the bicycle.
"Sorry. You can't what?"
"Say names," the bicycle replied awkwardly. "We just can't, that's all. But you know who we mean."
"No, I bloody don't," Paul wailed. "Come on," he went on, forcing himself to get a grip, "don't give up on me, give me a clue. How'd it be if I said some names and you answered yes or no?"
"No names," grunted the bicycle. Was it, just possibly, scared? "We don't hold with them. And besides, you --"
"I know, right. Only I don't. Okay, how about descriptions? You know. Old, young, height, hair colour, glasses or no glasses --"
Now the bike sounded palpably uncomfortable. "That wouldn't help. We do not understand - appearances. We deal only in essentials. We cannot see," it concluded painfully.
"Oh," Paul said. "I'm sorry." Hang on, he thought, it was threatening me. Where does it say in the rules that I've got to be an equal-opportunities victim? "Well, there must be something. I mean, you can recognise me, right? How do you do that?"
"By essentials," the bicycle told him, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. "We would know you in any place, at any time, in any guise. And if you don't let her go, we will hunt you down --"
"Yes, fine," Paul snapped. "Let's try it your way, shall we? What are the, um, essentials of this person I've got to let go?"
Pause, as though the bike was marshalling its thoughts. "Waterfalls," it said. "A suddenness. The urgency dwindles as the perception broadens, but gold is soft under the hammer. A Wednesday, at the end of a long alley of darkness. Her hair, like water lilies. The sharp edge is brittle. A thrice-used tissue, tucked into a sleeve, and then for ever."
Paul counted to five and then said, "You what?"
"You heard us," the bicycle growled at him. "You must let her go immediately, or she will die and so will you. We will kill you, because you will not suffer yourself to live. You will ask us to kill you, and we will oblige."
"Really?"
"Yes."
"Great." Paul took a deep breath, then smiled. "Jones," he said.
The bicycle wobbled slightly. "Do not attempt --"
"Parkinson. Sinclair. Cohen. Ivanovitch. Rashid. Banerji."
"Traitor! We defy you!"
Paul sighed. "Lennon," he said. "McCartney. Harrison. Starr." He grinned. "Rumpelstiltskin."
With a scream, the bicycle sprang away from the wall and reared up on its back wheel. For a split second Paul was convinced that it was about to charge him; then it crashed down onto two wheels, back-pedalled frantically, and shot away backwards down the passage that led, more often than not, to the stationery cupboard.
Paul was too weary to do anything more energetic than shrug. You had, he decided, to take the broad view in these matters; death threats from a blind push-bike that scarpered like buggery when you recited the names of the Beatles were probably the least of his problems.
[Chapter 7, p. 197-198]
They tiptoed back out the way they'd come in, the man poking his head round the door and looking both ways before he let them past into the main warehouse. "We'll be in touch," he said as he shooed them into the street. "Please don't phone." Then he slammed the door hard, and they stood listening to bolts shooting home and locks graunching for about thirty seconds. [...]
[Chapter 8, p. 215]
Another point he couldn't help but notice was that his Mum's writing style had changed rather, and some of the turns of phrase didn't sound like her at all. He tried to analyse the differences, but the only one he could put his finger on was that when he was a kid, all her sentences tended to start with the word don't.
[Chapter 8, p. 217-218]
It's a miserable thing to have a tea-bag memory, riddled with thousands of tiny holes through which information floods out. Paul had lived with the affliction for so long that he generally managed to rise above it; he wrote things down on scraps of paper, or tied knots in his handkerchief to remind him that he'd tied knots in his other handkerchief, or stuck yellow stickies on doors and VDU screens to remind him to check his handkerchief. Forgetting something as big and important as The Plan was, however, seriously careless even by his standards. [...]
[Chapter 11, p. 314-315]
Still. He couldn't think of anything better, or even anything worse; his mind was completely blank, presumably an after-effect of whatever the Fey had done to him while he was asleep. He thought about it for a moment and decided: Let's go for it. Just because it's a bloody silly idea and there isn't a hope in hell of it working and it'll almost certainly make things very much worse, it doesn't mean I shouldn't do it. It's how governments make laws, after all.
[Chapter 11, p. 317]
Step two. Paul had heard it said that step two didn't hurt, not that he could understand how anybody could possibly know. He hoped very much that the rumours were accurate for once, since he'd long since faced up to the fact that he didn't so much have a pain threshold as a pain cat-flap. [...]
[Chapter 11, p. 318]
[...] Now I doubt very much whether your parents will have told you about your pedigree - they don't know yet themselves, and I'm in two minds about whether to tell them or not. My nephew Donny has many sterling qualities, I guess; for one thing, he's mostly waterproof and his fingernails grow pretty well, and he plays an adequate game of canasta. But he's also loud, arrogant, stupid, bad-tempered and so far up himself he's in danger of coming out of his own ear. I don't know Lynn all that well yet, but I have my suspicions she's mostly a waste of valuable resources, and the best that can be said of her is that she can use a knife and fork without putting anybody's eye out. But there it is; you can't choose your parents (I chose them for you; see below) and maybe you'll turn out all right in the end: brave, clever, resourceful, caring and dedicated, like me. Stranger things have happened.
[Chapter 13, p. 355]
Not that Paul cared particularly. For the first time, he really and truly felt like he was dead; the affairs of the living seemed remote, distasteful and faintly ridiculous, like American politics. Soon, he knew, he'd have to make a tremendous effort to remember anything about his past life
[Chapter 15, p. 410]

From Earth, Air, Fire and Custard by Tom Holt (Orbit, 2006):

At one minute past nine the next morning, Paul rang JWW and, knowing the drill, asked to speak to Christine, Mr Tanner's secretary.
"It's Paul,' he said. "Just to let you know I'm not feeling well, so I won't be coming in today."
He could picture the stormy crease of her eyebrows. "What's wrong with you?"
"I died."
Pause. "You don't sound very dead to me."
"I sort of got better," Paul admitted. "But it's only temporary. Sooner or later I'll have a relapse and then that'll be it, kerboom, finito. So really, there's not a lot of point me coming in, is there?"
Christine wasn't the sharpest serpent's tooth in the kindergarten, but she could spot a rhetorical question when she heard one. "Have you got a doctor's note?"
"What? No, I haven't. But you could ask Benny Shumway to check with Mr Dao at the Bank if you like. He'll tell you that I'm telling the truth, and you can't get more authoritative than that, can you?"
But Christine wasn't so easily fobbed off. "It says in the book you're entitled to sick leave," she said. "Doesn't say anything about death leave. You hang on there a minute while I go and check with Mr Tanner."
To Paul's great surprise, Mr Tanner was prepared to let him have a day off; not just one, in fact, but the traditional three. If, however, he hadn't risen again from the dead on the third day, he'd better be able to have a death certificate, a valid will and a little urn of ashes ready for inspection when he finally did condescend to show up, or the old cliché about a fate worse than death might suddenly take on new and startlingly vivid penumbras of meaning. [...]
[Chapter 4, p. 86-87]
When Paul woke up, he had a bad, bad headache.
He also had a crick in his neck that made him whimper when he tried to get up; also, he noticed, he wasn't in bed. For some reason he'd chosen to go to sleep in the kitchen doorway, like someone's faithful dog. With the benefit of hindsight (and the light streaming in through the windows was so obnoxiously bright that even hindsight hurt) he could see that this hadn't been a good idea, and he wondered why he'd done it; also, why he was still fully dressed in his work suit.
Then memory began to seep back, like oil through a chip wrapper. The pub. Alcohol abuse. That, of course, explained everything -- the headache, the lack of judgement as regards sleeping arrangements, even the hazy recollection at the back of his mind of a long and earnest conversation with his fridge. Something about a cow -- Talking of fridges; Paul stood up, wobbled and sat down again. Since he'd more or less mastered the walking business by the time he was two, he wondered what was wrong, but a quick survey of the floor, followed by cursory examination of the soles of his shoes revealed rather a lot of gungy, slippery yellow stuff; something he'd trodden in at some point in his adventures, and it was probably just as well he couldn't remember anything about it. He crawled to his knees and stumped across the floor to the fridge, opened the door and gazed blearily inside. Once he'd got used to the blinding glare of the light, he found what he needed: a beautifully chilled Coke can, which he pressed carefully against his throbbing temples. Blessed numbness gradually spread, and he sighed. Thirty seconds of the treatment, and he felt ready for stage two, a long drink of cold orange juice.
[...]
Phases three and four involved aspirin and coffee. Phase five was a scheduled R & R break, five minutes sitting motionless at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. He hadn't worked out phase six in any detail, since he'd hardly expected to live that long, but in the event he winged it; a shower, a shave, clean shirt and underwear left him looking more or less human, and with luck nobody would get close enough to know any different. By eight-fifteen, he was sentient, self-propelled and late for his bus.
[Chapter 6, p. 153]
Left alone, Paul sat cross-legged on the floor and tried to think. His mind was so full of weirdnesses that concentrating was like trying to drink with chopsticks, but gradually he began to patch together a plan of action.
[Chapter 10, p. 226]
"This," Antonia said, "is Death Row. No, don't worry, it's not like that. It's just a sort of nickname. This is where all the expartners have their offices, you see."
"Ex-partners," Paul repeated. "Um, if that's an explanation, I guess I must be too thick to understand it."
Antonia giggled. "Quite all right," she said. "'Ex' is just a polite way of saying dead. You see, when you get made a partner in J. W. Wells, you have to sign a partnership agreement, and the terms and conditions are pretty, well, strict, really. Basically, unless the others decide to throw you out on your ear for stealing money or something, once a partner, always a partner. And they don't let you off the hook just because your body eventually wears out and you die. You just get moved to a smaller office. Like this one."
Paul frowned; then he opened his mouth and closed it again.
"Other firms have sleeping partners," Antonia went on. "That's where you don't do any work but you still get a share of the money. We've got the opposite; we don't get paid, but the contract says we still have to work. So they shunt us up here, in Theo Van Spee's artificial dimension, where the rules aren't quite the same; and that, by the way, is why you never found this part of the building before, if you've only been here in ordinary space. It's all rather clever, really,' she said, with just the very faintest hint of bitterness. "At the time, when you sign on, you think gosh, that's wonderful, it's as good as being immortal. But after a while --" She sighed. "My speciality is applied numerology; that's doing magic with numbers, which is just another way of saying I'm an accountant. And you don't have to be alive to be an accountant, in fact in many ways it's a positive drawback; so here I am, thirty-seven years after I died, still plugging quietly away."
[Chapter 10, p. 239-240]
The precise moment when the world changed was 17 August AD 722, on a small island off the coast of Norway's Ranrike province. [...] By the beginning of the thirteenth century, Canada would have seized its independence; by the fourteenth, it would have grown to be the second most powerful Western nation, after France. There would have followed the usual round of religious and social conflicts, culminating in a bitter civil war somewhere around 1972, during which my client's bank would have sided with the winning faction, thereby ensuring their financial supremacy in the New World until the sun eventually goes cold and the planet ceases to be habitable. Beyond that I did not care to speculate, since the extinction of all sentient life on the planet introduces variables into the calculations that I cannot reliably extrapolate from.
[Chapter 11, p. 263-264]
[...] As for Paul, dragged along behind the sword as it lunged, cut, parried, riposted, counterthrust, he felt a bit like a small, frail policeman trying to arrest a huge, drunk Marine in the middle of a fight. Luckily, nothing he did seemed to matter in the slightest. The sword knew exactly what it wanted to do and seemed to regard him as an annoying but trivial handicap. It was bewildering, humiliating, exhausting and scary, and the closest thing to it in his narrow range of experiences was using Windows for the first time.
[Chapter 11, p. 263-264]
"Sophie," he said.
"Well?"
Christ. "I don't know how to put this," Paul said with transparent sincerity, "but I think -- well, I think we ought to give it another go. If you'd like to, I mean."
She looked at him. "Not really," she said.
"Oh."
Bugger, he thought. It was one of those horrible relationship moments where it was your fault for not being a telepath and knowing exactly what she was thinking so you could say the right thing. He could see Sophie waiting, with imperfectly disguised impatience; she wasn't actually tapping her foot or looking pointedly at her watch, but absolutely the next best thing. And he couldn't think of anything to say to 'Not really'.
[Chapter 14, p. 337]
Time is funny in dreams; it stretches and flollops about like fondue. In Paul's dream, it started as a day at work [...] And then it was lunchtime, and he was happy, because he had a lunch date; but the date was with the bloody awful Pettingell cow, [...]
Really, it was so revolting it was fascinating, and he tuned in to what she was saying, purely out of morbid curiosity; and she was saying that the problem was that although she could talk to him, she couldn't really talk to him, because although he listened to her, sometimes she felt he wasn't really listening, because she felt that when he listened, he wasn't really hearing what she was saying, only what he thought she was saying, and also the other way round too, because apparently he also had a tendency to say what he thought she wanted to hear rather than what he actually felt, which meant she couldn't say what she really wanted to say, she had to say what she thought he wanted her to say so that he'd think she was saying what she was actually trying to say, and couldn't he see that that was really hopeless and it was impossible for them to really communicate -- [...]
[Chapter 16, p. 377]

From You don't Have to be Evil to Work Here, But it Helps by Tom Holt (Orbit, 2006):

Opportunity; he considered the concept objectively. To date, opportunities had mostly been things offered to Colin via c-mail by benevolent Nigerian lawyers. Otherwise, he had always followed a path ordained for him by those who knew better - and a pretty narrow track it had been, running straight through a small and circumscribed world consisting mostly of rather boring work and running errands for senior family members.
[Chapter 1, p. 12]
Benny pulled open a filing-cabinet drawer and took out a folder. "Auditors are auditors," he said. "I often wonder what makes someone decide that's what he wants to be when he grows up. A sadistic streak and a total lack of a sense of humour, probably."
[Chapter 2, p. 25]
The thin-faced girl opened the door of the closed file store and went inside. Cassie wasn't sure, but she had an idea that she heard the click of a lock, or the graunch of a bolt. You don't have to be weird to work here, she thought, but --
[Chapter 3, p. 53]
To drown out the noise of her own thoughts, Cassie switched on the telly. That was a good move on her part, since it reminded her that although her life was in many respects sad and dreary it wasn't such a hopeless mess that she wanted to escape from it for an hour by watching an Australian soap opera. With a faint smile, she picked up the remote, drew a bead on one of the actors on the screen like Kirk aiming his phaser, and thumbed the off-button.
[Chapter 5, p. 87]
"That's management for you," Connie said wearily. "The maximum brutality working hand in hand with the minimum logic to achieve the worst possible outcome - it's the proud old tradition of British industrial relations. No, they could see I wasn't going to wear my baseball cap and be a happy camper, so they've flushed me down the bog, and the hell with thirty years of bloody hard work." She shrugged. [...]
[Chapter 8, p. 129]
"Dennis," she said. "Haven't seen you in a while."
Mr Tanner wasn't looking her in the eye, which meant he'd heard about her getting the sack. "Been run off my feet by the bastard auditors," he said.
[...] "Apart from that, though," Connie said. "You've made friends with them, I trust; passed round the family snapshots, talked about United's chances in the League this season, all that sort of thing."
Mr Tanner laughed. "Yeah, right," he said. "There's three blokes who look like the Nazgul in pinstripes, and a skinny hatchet-faced bird who keeps saying 'Well?' at me every time she asks me a question and I don't answer her inside half a second. If death's half as scary, I'll have to think seriously about living for ever. You got the Takemura file handy?"
[Chapter 8, p. 130]
"Right." Pause. The voice was brisk, normally the sort of tone he'd be intimidated by; and he was, but not nearly as much as he'd usually have been. "You got a minute?"
"Sure," Colin replied. "Is this about --?"
"No." Another pause, though slightly shorter this time. "It's really more a sort of personal matter. Look, it's difficult to explain. I don't suppose there's any chance you could spare me half an hour? This evening, preferably. Sevenish?"
"I suppose so," Colin said doubtfully. "Why?"
"If I could explain why over the phone, I wouldn't need to come dragging out all the way to Richmond, or wherever the hell you are. Sorry," the voice added, "I'm having one of those days. Actually, I've been having one of those lives, but it's only just starting to catch up with me."
[Chapter 8, p. 132]
Cassie Clay picked up the phone, put it to her ear, reached out for the keypad and hesitated. A promise was a promise. Furthermore -- well, furthermore, she was a professional, but she did still have a few conscience-coloured stains in the lining of her soul that wouldn't come out, not even with the boil-wash. [...]
[Chapter 11, p. 183]

From Faust Among Equals by Tom Holt (Orbit, 2003):

When it was all finally over, Lundqvist got to his feet, wiped the stake off on a patch of couch grass and stuck it back in his belt. There were times, he realised, when the job did get to him, although he found it hard to admit it to himself. Not the danger, of course, or the incessant conflict with hideous and unnatural monsters, or the mind-bending horrors he came face to face with every day of his life. Certainly not the killing. When a man is tired of killing, he's tired of life.
No, Lundqvist said to himself as he tucked the vampire's severed head under his arm, shouldered the rifle and started the long walk back to the jeep, I guess what really bothers me most is the lack of excitement.
[Chapter 1, p. 8]
Out of a particularly ill-fated year (his contemporaries included Martin Luther, Matthias Corvinus and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark) Lucky George was the student people remembered as having come to the most spectacularly sticky end. So devastating was the ensuing scandal that the university authorities promptly dropped Black Arts from the University curriculum; replacing it, seamlessly, with economics. [...]
[Chapter 2, p. 26]
Mrs Loredano, meanwhile, was explaining to Mrs Steno why their respective husbands had abandoned the restaurant at the height of the mid-day rush. She knew all about it, having been let in on the secret some years ago; and besides, she believed that a good marriage is built on mutual trust. Mrs Steno, who believed that a good' marriage is built on unilateral terrorism, hadn't been favoured with her husband's confidence in this regard.
[Chapter 5, p. 68-69]
Engineers are a bit like mountain-climbers; not in the sense of having bushy beards and no toes because of frostbite, but because the one thing they really can't resist is a challenge. Ask an engineer to change the washer on a leaking tap and he'll tell you to get lost. Show him a design for making water roll uphill without pressure and drive a flywheel and ask him if he thinks it might work, and before you know it he's reaching for his Vernier calipers and his slide rule, and all you've got to do is decide whether you want the flywheel in pale fawn or avocado.
[Chapter 16, p. 189]
"Hi, God," said Lucky George.
"Could you just pass me that file?" God replied. "Not that one, the little Swiss job with the red handle. Ta."
George looked down the rack, saw something like an extrathin hair with the appropriate coloured handle, and passed it over. God pushed his glasses back up his nose, closed one eye and swept the file feather-light over the surface of the metal.
"Bugger," he said. "Pressed too hard. Look, bloody great graunch-marks all over the thing. Have to stone it all off and start again." He sighed, and reached for an atom-thin whetstone. "I must be having one of those days," he said.
[Chapter 19, p. 261]

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