Joe Country Quotes

“as with any mystery, you have to address the four Fs.” No one dared ask. “Who the fuck, what the fuck, where the fuck and why the fuck,” Lamb continued”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“The thing about somebody else's car was, it was automatically an all-terrain vehicle.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“It turned out that in the governance of a nation’s security, many absurd situations had to be worked around: a toxic clown in the Foreign Office [Boris Johnson], a state visit by a narcissistic bed-wetter [Trump], the tendency of the electorate to 'jump off' the occasional cliff [Brexit].”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“it’d be like choosing between Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan in a bare-knuckle death match. There ought to be a way both could lose.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“Antibiotics’ll clear it up.’ ‘They tend not to work with drink taken.’ ‘They’re drugs, they’re not fucking Irishmen.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“MARTIN KREUTZMER LIKED TO read the Guardian, because it kept him in touch with that strain of self-lacerating smugness which hoped to inherit the earth, but would have no clue what to do with it.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“...he couldn’t help wondering how it had felt: refugees turning up from concentration camps, from a broken Europe, to find this bleak estate; its squat huts their new homes. There’d been watch towers and barbed wire fences. It can’t have looked like freedom. But freedom was measured, he supposed, by what you were leaving behind.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“Her life was not what she might have wanted it to be, but that was no reason for destroying what it was.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“This is what memory is: an abiding awareness that some things have vanished. And this is what consciousness is: the knowledge that more absences will come.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“the potential for an unhappy ending being a recognised tax on female beauty.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“He raised a hand to forestall her response.
‘Don’t bother denying it. We both know the PM’s a tormented creature [Theresa May]. Like one of those soft toys lorry drivers fix to their radiator grilles.That expression she wears, it’s terror at all the oncoming vehicles.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“Catherine closed her eyes and saw it again: [Charles] Partner’s body in the bathtub; the contents of his head a red mess on the porcelain. A pulpy mixture, like trodden grapes. Some memories seared themselves on your mind, like a shadow on a wall after a nuclear flash.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“River would suggest they [Lamb, Taverner] get a room, provided the room was soundproofed, locked, and had an alligator in it.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“it’s always sad when legends die. It underlines the fact that shit like death can happen to anyone.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“The bed the O.B. would never leave was a clinical, robust device, with upright panels to prevent him from rolling off, and various machines monitoring his progress. On one, his pulse echoed, a signal tapped out from a wavering source. A last border crossing, thought River. His grandfather was entering joe country.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“That was what life was: you worked, sometimes you couldn't sleep, and your future was already being shaped. Until something crashed into it and knocked everything out of true.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“The thought processes of a man who'd relax with his shoes off, his coat on, were foreign territory to Lech.Then again, the thought processes of Jackson Lamb, as revealed by their subsequent conversation, were probaby terra incognita to the psychiatric profession as a whole.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“between endless examples of fat bastardy, there was the odd moment of slick trickery too.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“It just hid behind closed doors, like Trump in a tantrum. So”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“Because what we’ve got ourselves here is a mystery, and as with any mystery, you have to address the four Fs.” No one dared ask. “Who the fuck, what the fuck, where the fuck and why the fuck,”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“All his life, River had heard tales from the old man’s past, the failures, the victories, the stalemates, and he had learned to read between the lines enough to tell which was which. But no longer. The scraps he heard now were remnants from a shot memory; tattered flags blown by conflicting winds.You’d need a map to know which side the old man had been on. Which might have been the last secret he needed to impart to his grandson; that in the end, all lines blurred. That no day had firm borders.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“The fields all around were smooth plains, and the trees against the morning skyline looked like Christmas decorations. Snow, though. Soft and fluffy on the outside, but ruthless as a shark. It was the fucking Disney Corp by other means.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“Every footfall was helping return the city's streets to their unadorned state, while yesterday's snowflakes learned the lesson London offers to all who settle there: that while all are unique, most appear identical, both before and after being trodden upon.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“Lamb broke wind loudly. Nobody moved. “Did I misfart? That’s your signal to leave.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“Multi-task? He couldn’t charge his phone while having a dump.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“Given the run of the hub, they’d pinpoint his whereabouts in hours, but with the resources at their disposal River might as well be on Slough House’s roof, using a kitchen roll holder as a telescope.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“Perhaps it was true what they said about age: that in its darker corners lurk the monsters of our own making.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“solipsism;”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“But that was a thing about life: it had been known to favour bastards.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“And as in any line of business, a succeeding CEO who couldn’t make a bygone cock-up look like an opportunity missed wasn’t fit for management, and should take her retirement package, her annual bonus, her golden handshake and her non-disclosure kickback and tiptoe from the boardroom in disgrace.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country