I combined the First Chapter, First Paragraph, 34% and 56% with the other excerpts I enjoyed from this book.
First Chapter First
Paragraph
There have been two moments in my life when everything
changed. Moments when things could have gone either way. Moments when I had to
make a choice.
34%
He said, “You’ve come a long way since then. You stood in
front of me, radiating attitude and defiance and now look at you, heading up
the most important assignment we’ve ever had. I’m proud of you.”
56%
“Jesus,” whispered Dieter, “I am never going anywhere with
you again, Max. Ever. I’m not even using the dining room if you’re there. You’re
a [f***ing] disaster!”
Quotables (excerpts I
found amusing/interesting/personally relatable)
Studying history opened doors to other world and other time
and this became my escape and my passion.
Silence holds no fears for me. I never feel the urge to fill
it as so many other people do.
Although the phrase ‘time travel’ is so sci-fi. We don’t do
that. Here at St. Mary’s we investigate major historical events in contemporary
time.
But as Lisa Simpson once said, It is better to remain silent
and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
He smiled and said, ‘You’re not a team player. Yet. You don’t
trust people enough to place your safety in their hands. You don’t like relying
on other people and you especially don’t want to rely on me because you don’t
know me, you don’t like me, and you don’t trust me. At this very moment you’re
wishing I’d drop dead so you can vanish back to your room and enjoy your own solitary
self, doing whatever you do in there every night.
Size matters. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘There’s always tomorrow night. But
there wasn’t. It only goes to show – take your eye off the ball and Fate,
Destiny, History, call it what you will, steps up and just pisses all over your
chips.
Trouble had arrived and it was up to us to deal with it,
even if we had only stumbled upon it by accident.
It seemed very possible we would all be killed by idiots
rather than villains, which would be typical.
Everything you touch, everywhere you go, people die.
‘You’d better go after them,’ I said, eventually. ‘Markham’s
quite capable of getting into trouble between here and the back door!’
Apparently, there’s something in the Geneva Convention or
the Human Rights Thingy about leaving people lying around bleeding. I was going
to require some convincing.
He looked much better as people tend to do when they’ve got
fat, calories, salt, sugar, and cholesterol inside them.
That was the moment when everyone’s imagination took flight
and we became unstoppable.
Sod’s Law decrees if a thing can go wrong it will. We’ve
done our best but something will happen that we haven’t foreseen and then we’ll
just have to wing it.
You can say this about historians, we may be the
tea-drenched disaster magnets of St. Mary’s but bloody hell, can we think
quickly when we have to?
We grabbed from all over the Library so it should be a nice
mixed bag. Of course, with our luck, it’ll be just multiple copies of the
furniture inventory.
Society is rigid. Everyone knows everyone else in their
world. Everyone has their place in the scheme of things. If you don’t belong to
a family, a tribe, a village, a guild, whatever, you don’t exist then, either.
And you can’t just pitch up somewhere without mutual acquaintances,
recommendations, or letters of introduction. Life on the fringes of society,
any society in any time is tough.
‘DON’T YOU COME NEAR me, you devious, double-dealing, underhand,
rat-bastard. I’m going to gut you with a rusty breadknife and then stake your
honey-covered arse over an anthill in the noonday sun.’
Not so much the end – more a kind of pause…
