Neverwhere

She looked, Richard thought, as if she’d done a midnight raid on the History of Fashion section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and was still wearing everything she’d taken.

He continued, slowly, by a process of osmosis and white knowledge (which is like white noise, only more useful), to comprehend the city, a process that accelerated when he realized that the actual City of London itself was no bigger than a square mile, stretching from Aldgate in the east to Fleet Street and the law courts of the Old Bailey in the west, a tiny municipality, now home to London’s financial institutions, and that that was where it had all begun.

the projected life expectancy of a suicidal mayfly.

miniature. Mr. Croup took his hand away, leaving the blades in the wall, outlining the place his fingers had been, and he turned to his partner for approval.
Mr. Vandemar was unimpressed. “What’s so clever about that, then?” he asked. “You didn’t even hit one finger.”
Mr. Croup sighed. “I didn’t?” he said. “Well, slit my gullet, you’re right. How could I have been such a ninny?” He pulled the razor blades out of the wall, one by one, and

Richard found himself, on otherwise sensible weekends, accompanying her to places like the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery, where he learned that walking around museums too long hurts your feet, that the great art treasures of the world all blur into each other after a while, and that it is almost beyond the human capacity for belief to accept how much museum cafeterias will brazenly charge for a slice of cake and a cup of tea.

“You’ve a good heart,” she told him. “Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go.” Then she shook her head. “But mostly, it’s not.”

he had a rumpled, just-woken-up look to him, which made him more attractive to the opposite sex than he would ever understand or believe.

He tried to apologize to her in French, which he did not speak, gave up, and began to apologize in English, then tried to apologize in French for having to apologize in English, until he noticed that Jessica was about as English as it was possible for any one person to be.

It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers.

He had lank, greasy hair, of an unlikely orange color, and a pallid complexion; and as Richard opened the door, he smiled, widely, and just a fraction too late, with teeth that looked like an accident in a graveyard.