Good Omens

"Whatre they playing at?" said Aziraphale. "I dont know," said Crowley, "but I think its called silly buggers." His tone suggested that he could play, too. And do it better."

"The redhaired woman in the corner of the hotel bar was the most successful war correspondent in the world. She now had a passport in the name of Carmine Zuigiber; and she went where the wars were. Well. More or less. Actually she went where the wars werent. Shed already been where the wars were."

"Apart from, of course, the fact that the world was an amazing interesting place which they both wanted to enjoy for as long as possible, there were few things that the two of them agreed on, but they did see eye to eye about some of those people who, for one reason or another, were inclined to worship the Prince of Darkness. Crowley always found them embarrassing. You couldnt actually be rude to them, but you couldnt help feeling about them the same way that, say, a Vietnam veteran would feel about someone who wears combat gear to Neighborhood Watch meetings."

"Its Tchaikovskys Another One Bites the Dust," said Crowley, closing his eyes as they went through Slough. To while away the time as they crossed the sleeping Chilterns, they also listened to William Byrds "We Are the Champions" and Beethovens "I Want To Break Free." Neither were as good as Vaughan Williamss "Fat-Bottomed Girls."

"It wasnt a dark and stormy night. It should have been, but thats the weather for you."

"God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players*, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who wont tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."

"TV Show version : I play an ineffable game of my own devising. For everyone else, its like playing poker in a pitch dark room for infinite stakes with a Dealer who won´t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."

"Many phenomena — wars, plagues, sudden audits — have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for Exhibit A."

"Fourteenth-century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly it was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldnt pick the buggers off one by one any more; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldnt understand. Theyd never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example. Or value-added tax. Or Manchester."

"Just when youd think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger."

"Thats how it goes, you think youre on top of the world, and suddenly they spring Armageddon on you. The Great War, the Last Battle. Heaven versus Hell, three rounds, one Fall, no submission. And thatd be that. No more world. Thats what the end of the world meant. No more world. Just endless Heaven or, depending who won, endless Hell. Crowley didnt know which was worse."

"There were people who called themselves Satanists who made Crowley squirm. It wasnt just the things they did, it was the way they blamed it all on Hell. Theyd come up with some stomach-churning idea that no demon could have thought of in a thousand years, some dark and mindless unpleasantness that only a fully-functioning human brain could conceive, then shout "The Devil Made Me Do It" and get the sympathy of the court when the whole point was that the Devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didnt have to. That was what some humans found hard to understand. Hell wasnt a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowleys opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind."