Ian Tregillis > Quotes

“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, The Mechanical

“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, Bitter Seeds

“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, Something More Than Night

“The prosperity achieved through slavery had a way of blinding men’s hearts to the evil of their own hands.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“humans carried heavy obligations, too, but called them culture. Society.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“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, Something More Than Night

“Clakkers carried complex geasa by dint of alchemy; humans carried heavy obligations, too, but called them culture. Society.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“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, Something More Than Night

“Freedom felt like… nothing. Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony. A gap in his consciousness where geasa had perpetually jostled for priority, demanding his obedience. It was the photographic negative of Jax’s existence during every minute of the 118 years since he’d been forged. It was overwhelming. Exhilarating. Terrifying.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“How did humans guide themselves? How did they know what to do and what not to do?”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“Jesus Christ on a six-day wine bender.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Rising

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph on a bad-tempered camel.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Rising

“Magdalene’s handjobs,”
― Ian Tregillis, The Rising

“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, Something More Than Night

“Christ on a pus-dripping syphilitic camel,”
― Ian Tregillis, The Rising

“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, Something More Than Night

“Freedom felt like… nothing. Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“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, Something More Than Night

“Jesus’s bloody tears.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Rising

“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, The Mechanical

“Speaking of which, a Dominion brushed past me carrying the final digits to a half-dozen transcendental numbers. It passed them along to a whirling Throne who appeared to be acting as an impromptu sub-foreman, who passed them up the chain to where they could do some good. A cloud of Powers surveyed the damage and orchestrated the repair effort with a thousand-dimensional bird’s-eye view. Somebody had built scaffolding out of a mathematics both consistent and complete (chew on that, Gödel) and now the spackle went on one axiom at a time.”
― Ian Tregillis, Something More Than Night

“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, Something More Than Night

“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, The Mechanical

“You greasy shit stain on a diseased elk’s warty asshole.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“You weaselly short-dicked elk-fucker.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Rising

“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, The Mechanical

“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, The Mechanical

“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, Something More Than Night

“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, The Mechanical