C.K. McDonnell > Quotes

“The key to life,’ said Banecroft, ‘is looking and acting like you know exactly what you are doing at all times. Margaret Thatcher said that.’ ‘Did she really?’ He turned and raised an eyebrow. ‘No, but thank you for having proved my point.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“Mrs Harnforth spoke as if addressing the room rather than any one individual. ‘Who was it that said sarcasm is the lowest form of wit?’ ‘I don’t know,’ replied Banecroft, ‘but I guarantee they’d not seen the internet before they said it.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“Fifteen per cent of people meet their future partners at work. I read that in a magazine.’ ‘He arrested me.’ ‘Nineteen per cent of people have used handcuffs at some point in their relationship. I read that in a slightly less God-fearing magazine.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“He’d never managed to get as much information out of a suspect as users were seemingly happy to give up on creating an account.”
― C.K. McDonnell, This Charming Man

“Yes,’ said Sturgess, in a way that acknowledged a lot of words had just been spoken.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“People hold a lot of false assumptions about hippies. For a start, they’re not the relaxed individuals people imagine them to be. If you were to leave two of them in a room for long enough, you could guarantee a heated and bitter argument. They all have remarkably entrenched ideas about how the world, the human body, and damn near everything else works. The only thing a lot of them have in common is a fevered certainty that the world would be a better place if everyone just listened to them.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“It had been quite a while since she’d flirted. It was like riding a bike, in that you probably shouldn’t do it in public without practising first.”
― C.K. McDonnell, This Charming Man

“I like that kid. She’s got a wonderful angry energy. Like she’s decided life is crap and we’re all just killing time until we meet a slow and painful death. She is well ahead of the game on that front.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“What would you call it when a couple from Wolverhampton believes that alien beings – as in highly sophisticated creatures capable of intergalactic space travel – are inexplicably interested in not just Wolverhampton, but the meat and two veg of a bloke called Clive from Wolverhampton?”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“I was rather hoping we might talk in private?’ said Dr Carter. ‘I’m afraid that isn’t possible. In these more cautious times, our organization has a policy that if one of us has to meet with beings of pure evil then another member of staff has to be present. It’s political correctness gone mad.”
― C.K. McDonnell, This Charming Man

“where the desks looked as they normally did – Reggie’s neat and tidy, Ox’s like a vacuum cleaner and a recycling bin had fought to the death over a takeaway order.”
― C.K. McDonnell, Love Will Tear Us Apart

“Grace waggled her eyebrows to an extent Hannah would not have thought possible on the human face. To be fair, in Hannah’s old crowd of Botoxed ‘friends’, facial expressions were something you picked from a catalogue and stuck with for the rest of your life.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“Because on a base level, to which none of us admits, we all secretly think it’s pretty much done by magic – and on an even deeper level, we all know that you don’t question magic with logic, or else the magic might get the hump and stop working.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“He was like an inverse fairy godmother – every time you didn’t want Banecroft, he magically appeared.”
― C.K. McDonnell, This Charming Man

“The car was old. Not classic old, just old old. He’d tried to sell it last year but couldn’t interest even the scrapyard in purchasing it. He called it ‘the Zombie’ because, despite bits falling off, the sickly engine and a near-constant groaning noise from the suspension, it inexplicably kept going.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“She looked at the glass in her other hand. ‘Also, some lemonade. Everyone likes lemonade.’ ‘I don’t,’ said Banecroft. ‘You are not included in everyone and you never have been.’ ‘I always suspected.”
― C.K. McDonnell, This Charming Man

“God, I really hate people now.’ ‘You do not mean that,’ said Grace in a cheerful tone of voice. ‘You have just forgotten how nice most people are. As soon as you meet somebody who does not think their tortoise is a vampire or that Sigourney Weaver is trying to control them through the TV, you will remember how much you like people.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“I appreciate you think everything in life should be fixed by you shouting at it, but sadly that is not the case.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“Hands in the air, and don’t move.’ ‘Which is it?’ asked the man. ‘What?’ barked Banecroft. ‘I have to move to put my hands in the air.’ ‘Obviously, put your hands in the air, and then, don’t move. There was an Oxford comma between the two actions, implying a list of events happening in sequence.’ He glanced across at Stella, who was standing on the other side of Hannah. ‘See? I told you it was important.”
― C.K. McDonnell, This Charming Man

“Great music was made by arseholes. You want nice people, join a gospel choir. Amplification makes everything better and everyone worse.”
― C.K. McDonnell, Relight My Fire

“Apologies were fast becoming a lost art form, thanks to the repeated warping of the concept. There was the ‘I’m sorry if anybody was offended’ apology; the ‘I’m sorry that somebody thinks I said this thing that I didn’t say’ apology; and its near-identical twin, the ‘I’m sorry if you misunderstood what I said’ apology. There were numerous variations, but they all amounted to the fact that the person wasn’t sorry at all.”
― C.K. McDonnell, Love Will Tear Us Apart

“From her pocket she pulled a fresh tube of toothpaste, a toothbrush and a can of deodorant. ‘Here are those toiletries you asked for.’ Banecroft looked at the items in confusion. ‘When did I ask for them? I didn’t ask for them!’ ‘OK,’ said Hannah. ‘I’ll rephrase: here are those toiletries you desperately need.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“When the doors had closed, Hannah turned to him. ‘Did we just commit a crime?’ ‘Didn’t you set a house on fire there a few weeks ago?’ ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ ‘I’m just saying – technically you’re on a spree.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“She was also cursed with the kind of terrifying certainty found only in drunks, religious zealots and people who used the word ‘sheeple’ on social media.”
― C.K. McDonnell, This Charming Man

“Ox leaned against the table, causing it to creak alarmingly. ‘Is it my imagination, or are people becoming more stupid? Or just more mean?’ ‘I have a sneaking suspicion,’ said Reggie, ‘that people are getting more scared. It tends to bring out the worst in them.”
― C.K. McDonnell, Love Will Tear Us Apart

“You’re a dessert shop. Why do you have a baseball bat under the counter?’ ‘There are some very angry diabetics out there.”
― C.K. McDonnell, This Charming Man

“You are a fighter. You got through a terrible marriage; you can get through this.’ ‘Really? That’s your motivational gambit?’ ‘Sorry, all of my husbands died loyal and decent men. I have not got a frame of reference for infidelity.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“Yes. It is tradition. The first month Vincent was here, he tried to stop it. There was nearly a riot. One gentleman tried to set himself on fire.’ ‘Oh my!’ Grace waved her hand dismissively. ‘He did not have petrol or anything; he just tried to set his anorak alight with a box of matches.”
― C.K. McDonnell, The Stranger Times

“He took to accountancy like a duck to accountancy.”
― C.K. McDonnell, Tales from the Stranger Times, Volume 1

“It was a brand from the US, after all – a nation with prudish peculiarities, seemingly more alarmed by the proliferation of drag queens than automatic weapons.”
― C.K. McDonnell, Relight My Fire