The Russia House Quotes
"After fierce rain showers all day long, a false sunlight was blazing in the puddles and raising vapour from the pavements."
"Their vigour contrasted unhelpfully with the chipped green racks of sound cassettes along the walls, featuring Winnie-the-Pooh and Advanced Computer English in Three Hours."
"It is not making it for Mr. Barley Scott Blair, love him as I may."
"Women, they're my hobby, my life's study and my consuming passion."
"Better to keep our powder dry till the Moscow book fair in September."
"The Russkies love a book, you see, Bernard, but the audio market scares them and they aren't geared for it."
"Our greatest progress is in the field of backwardness."
"The American strategists can sleep in peace. Their nightmares cannot be realised."
"The Soviet knight is dying inside his armour."
"Our friend's all right, is he?" said Landau, unable to resist asking.
"Good voices do not always belong to good faces, but Ned's did."
"The line between actually very serious and actually very funny is actually very thin," he remarked.
"Blind children cannot chew, Gravey, my dear old charmer," Barley was explaining patiently.
"First you’re commercial, now you’re spies," he said.
"Why didn’t you go to Moscow?" Clive asked without waiting any longer for Barley to settle.
"Would you rather I came here with a man?" Barley asked. "What’s it got to do with you and the CIA whether I came here with a woman or a Muscovy duck?"
"His way of looking beyond the present company into some troubled private territory of his own; of bursting into noisy talk as a means of exorcising ghosts that no one else had seen; of snapping his fingers without cause, as if to say, 'That’s settled then,' where, so far as anybody else knew, nothing had been proposed in the first place."
"And I’m telling you that if I feel the urge I’ll paint it on the rooftops."
"Debts everywhere. No one knowing where you are. Trails of weeping mistresses. Are you trying to destroy yourself or what?"
"I have a Board. I have Trustees. I have family shareholders. I have aunts. They like the old safe lines."
"All victims are equal. None are more equal than others."
"Today one must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being."
"You cannot imagine how much confidence I derive from your rejection."
"I commit the sin of science every day. I turn ploughshares into swords. I mislead our masters. I mislead yours. I perpetuate the lie. I murder the humanity in myself every day."
"I am not so afraid of the dark night as the friends I do not know."
"It’s an unfair business. You’ve had a big secret thrust on you. You didn’t ask for it but you can’t unknow it."
"Empathy is a curse even when it is short-lived, and not all the bad law in England can protect me from it."
"No leader wants to go down in history as the ass who destroyed his country in an afternoon."
"We’re all the wrong men. We’re dealing with wrong things."
"Any decent Church would have burned you bastards at the stake long ago."
"How convenient, for him and me, if I could have pointed to some great crime that haunted him."
"If you just hadn’t said all that stuff we’d have been fine. I’d have been happy just having an affair."
"You have to believe in what you are doing. I do. I absolutely do."
"Because they are the last great frontier in an over-discovered world. Because they try so hard to be like us and start from so far back."
"In the new climate, doing nothing was itself an act of opposition. Because by doing nothing we change nothing. And by changing nothing we hang on to what we understand, even if it is the bars of our own gaol."
"She was learning to appreciate his long-windedness. He was giving her time to steady herself."
"I suspect you'll be right at that. Anyway the question is, how can I give them to you?"
"Because God always found excuses not to come here."
"Because of the huge heart beating inside the huge shambles. Because the shambles is my own."
"He'd prefer to take the long swim and not come back, he said, so they got drunk together and planned the trip to Capri, one last great meal, a gallon of red and the long swim to nowhere through the filthy Mediterranean."
"Andy was alive still, with nothing to live for and nothing to die of, cursing that he hadn’t done the swim in time, and trying to find a meaning for himself that death wouldn’t take away."
"The word they’re thinking of is udobno. It means convenient but it also means proper, which must be a bit confusing sometimes."
"With beautiful, intelligent, virtuous women, you simply never know where they stand."
"Spying is normality taken to extremes. Spying is waiting."
"We regard the destruction of Russia as preferable to the destruction of all mankind."
"We shall not build a new world until we have got rid of the mentalities of the old."
"He has always been idealistic. That is his nature."
"In Russia we have secrecy and we have loneliness, but we have no word for privacy."
"I shall do all the ferreting myself. This war is far too important to be left to our blue-rinse generals of Registry, irresistible though they may be."
"And I do not think I am speaking with hindsight when I tell you that my blood ran chill for Walter, without my having the smallest idea why."
"We were in the slums of modern science, where the grass is always nicely cut."
"A breath of country air," Ned told me on the internal telephone an hour later when I was barely back at my desk at Head Office. "Tell Clive I need you."
"A mushroom-shaped cloud would have looked entirely natural."
"He's half personnel, half security, all shit."
"I thought as much, though I didn't say anything."
"He wasn't sneaky. He wasn't resentful. He had his doubts but, as scientists go, he was a good soldier."
"Life's a botch," he explained, as he shoved the glass into my hand.
"Nothing happens without something happening."
"You cannot dine with Katya Orlova in an intimate and rather crazy restaurant without at least fifteen of us being advised of it next morning."
"We are all broke and local telephone calls are free."
"If the present momentum continues, I shall have been in the vanguard."
"There is only now. There is no other dimension but now."
"We do not break the curse of secrecy by passing our secrets from hand to hand like thieves!"
"Our new people talk about openness, disarmament, peace. So let them have their openness. And their disarmament. And their peace."
"Will you publish me or must I start again in my search for a decent human being?"
"There is no longer the space in life to take each humble member of the human family on his merits."
"Seen from Washington, you're rampant. Seen from here, you're very nice, but how will I explain this to the next Congressional sub-committee of Bible-belt knuckle-draggers who take it into their heads to pillory Goethe's material because it endangers Fortress America?"
"Why does Goethe's material scare them? If the Russians can't shoot straight, Fortress America should be jumping for joy."
"I believe in Mr. Brown, I believe in Goethe, I believe in the material. And I'm scared shitless."
"We'll never know if we don't give it a try, will we?"
"The truth? The Sovs can't play? They're cost-cutting at every corner and the buffoons in Moscow don't know one half of the bad news because the buffoons in the field cheat on them so they can earn their gold watches and free caviar?"
"How do you peddle the arms race when the only asshole you have to race against is yourself?"
"My primary ambition is to knock so much shit out of the Pentagon firebreathers that they will never again tell the President of the United States that twenty rabbits make a tiger."
"I am a glasnostic, Harry. I have made certain discoveries about myself."
"And if anyone is shoving it off course, we are."
"For a moment, indeed, it seemed he would not even answer; the tolerance that was now so deeply seated in him seemed to tell him not to bother."
"I met Hannah the day following my return from the island and I assumed we would make love. She looked tall and golden, which is the way she always looks when I have not seen her for a while."
"It was important to Barley to notice the children first."
"I have joined the tiny ranks of people who know what they will do first if the ship catches fire in the middle of the night."
"And what was to be shoved aside, stepped over and left for dead."
"I can love a believer, I can love a heretic, but I cannot love an Englishman."
"Even in tragedy, I dream of a better world than yours!"
"He knew a better England by far, and it was inside himself."
"A great house-cleaning had taken place inside his mind, comprising quite humble details as well as grand themes."
"Because, as Barley had recently observed, it was in humble detail that grand themes wrought their havoc."
"Name me a joe in a bad country, Ned liked to say with a rueful smile, who doesn’t fall for a pretty face if she’s on his side against the world."
"You're a good man, Palfrey," she will say with terrible control on the days when she is trying to understand me. "You'll find a way. Maybe not now, but one day."
"I love you," he repeated. "All my failures were preparations for meeting you. Fact."
"It's a mature, unselfish, absolute, thrilling love. I've never known anything approaching it. I thought you ought to be the first to know."
"I love you so profoundly that I am ashamed to be articulate."
"Spying is waiting. Spying is worrying yourself sick while you watch Ned sink into a decline."
"We must cut down the grey men inside ourselves, we must burn our grey suits and set our good hearts free."
"Everything they had taught him was paying off as he rode calmly into battle to deceive them. But he was not their trickster."
"Once you start thinking that way, it’s pretty hard to think any other way."
"I need to betray my country and I’m in a hurry."
"Do you have any idea what will happen in Washington and Langley if I abort now?"
"The leaders of both sides hugging each other. Tears in their eyes. Looking more like each other every day."
"You think people never change because you don’t."