The Constant Gardener Quotes
"The news hit the British High Commission in Nairobi at nine-thirty on a Monday morning."
"Exactly why he was standing was a question he never resolved."
"The jacarandas, like everybody else, waiting for the long rains."
"A different Woodrow now, hackles up, nerves extended."
"‘Utter nonsense,’ Woodrow snapped back before he had given himself time to think."
"Moving by numbers now, Woodrow replaced the receiver, walked round his desk, picked up his jacket from the back of his chair and pulled it on, sleeve by sleeve."
"He was still quoting from notes or if he wasn’t he was pretending to."
"The police say Noah was decapitated. Is that right? Over."
"Tessa’s death require the urgent action of the spies?"
"Woodrow did not head directly for Justin’s room."
"Woodrow watched him give the room a last sightless look round."
"Justin’s hearing was better than either of them could have anticipated."
"The newly completed building he was ascending was austere and well designed."
"Justin scowling now, shoving himself away from the desk and placing himself upright at the centre of the room with his hands behind his back."
"He comes too close, Woodrow remembered. He overflies your territory and intercepts your signals before you make them."
"And at the centre of the dormitory, parked by itself in the passage between the beds, stood matron’s ironing board, on wheels."
"What the hell will he do? He hasn’t even got a career."
"‘So you mean you haven’t read them?’ she says, sticking determinedly to the subject of the documents."
"‘I didn’t know you were a rugger man, Justin! How very plucky of you,’ cried Gloria."
"It wasn't plucky at all. I was press-ganged into it by a thug of a housemaster who thought we weren't men till we'd been kicked to pieces."
"Why fight a battle that is won? Will the cemetery have us?"
"Read ’em and sling ’em is my motto, darling."
"Whatever we may think privately we must do nothing that could fan the flames."
"She fought for us no matter where the battleground, no matter what the taboos."
"GOODBYE MAMA TESSA. WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF YOUR COURAGE."
"Thank you, thank you, Mama Tessa, for your life."
"She was unhinged by her dead baby and unstable before it."
"Only the emancipation of African women could save us from the blunderings and corruption of our menfolk."
"I'm afraid that question is a little above my pay grade."
"She was a brilliantly designed engine with half the cogs missing."
"I promise, I promise. I love you and I promise."
"She had reached a point where she did not trust the High Commission, did not wish to be tainted by it."
"The so-called evidence offered in the document was tendentious."
"She was so impetuous. I loved that in her from the start."
"The great injustice – the great crime – was what kept her alive."
"She knew she had no excuse for being indifferent to what she saw and heard. She knew she owed."
"Tessa particularly disliked the sentimentalism that attaches to the disease in literature."
"The irresponsible quest for corporate profit is destroying the globe."
"Poverty on that scale is a discipline of its own. It can’t be learned in an afternoon."
"We who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it."
"Tessa’s darkest secret was her virtue. She loved to shock."
"I’m afraid it is really quite enough work trying to speak for one country."
"If grief, as he had read somewhere, was a species of idleness, then free of the idleness that thought of nothing but its grief."
"She had set her heart on an African hospital."
"Pain observed is journalistic pain. It’s diplomatic pain. It’s television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set."
"Who are the white hats? What is an ethical foreign policy?"
"Tessa was born rich but that never impressed her. She had no interest in money."
"She follows her conscience, I get on with my job. It was an immoral distinction."
"Playing his artificial self again, Justin vouchsafes her a tolerant frown."
"But this is not England, alas. You have no warrant and no local powers that I’m aware of."
"We’d like you to open all your luggage for us, please."
"Where are her papers – all her papers – physically and at this moment?"
"Throughout the night and late into the morning Justin sits on the edge of his bed, waiting."
"His face floated in it beside Tessa’s, like the masks of people he once knew."
"Outside his cabin window, wave after wave of frozen sea rolled towards a colourless infinity."
"All round him, white-shrouded passengers slept in the unearthly postures of the dead."
"One had her arm thrown upwards as if she had been shot while waving to someone."
"Another had his mouth open in a silent scream, and his dead man’s hand across his heart."
"It’s absolutely foul and fucking unfair and bloody horrible."
"I’d have come to the funeral if you’d let me! Christ, Justin!"
"‘It was better to have you holding the fort,’ said Justin kindly."
"That suit warm enough? Bit brass monkeys, isn’t it, after sunny Africa?"
"As the children grew they spent holidays together on Elba, skied together in Cortina."
"After the death of Tessa’s parents Ham had played the part of Tessa’s wise uncle."
"He was big and pink and shiny, with twinkly eyes and liquid cheeks that frowned or smiled with every inner breeze."
"The most comfortable thing you can do is assume they’re with you all the time."
"In a civilised country, you can never tell, gentlemen."
"ThreeBees Nairobi have sole import and distribution rights of said molecule plus all derivatives for the whole of the African continent."
"ThreeBees, President for Life and Master of the Universe one Kenneth K. Curtiss, Knight?"
"A canter round the course before the real thing."
"The operation completed, he sat back, still nursing the teapot, then lowered his head as if he were about to charge."
"It’s really quite extraordinary, looking at what’s since come to light, that Tessa was ever allowed to become that person."
"It’s really very hard for us here to understand how she ever got into this position in the first place."
"The portraits of disdainful buccaneers in periwigs no longer tipped him their familial smile."
"‘The Foreign Office formally disapproves of drinking at lunchtime these days, you’ll be relieved to hear,’ Pellegrin said."
"‘A quiet-house.’ The emphasis on quiet, like _green_house."
"The Foreign Office is no respecter of persons unfortunately."
"‘I’ve spent the whole morning thinking of all the things I won’t say to you,’ she began."
"Indefinite sick leave is the first thing. Indefinite because obviously it’s subject to medical reports."
"In your state, you’re perfectly entitled to put the phone down on them."
"By the way, I’m a Madeira cake. Don’t expect me to be multilayered."
"And if it’s a priest you’d like, instead of or as well, we have representatives of every denomination who’ve been cleared for most things so just ask."
"We won’t be standing at the prison gates, shoving baguettes au fromage at you through the bars."
"If we’d been able to get past you, we’d have had them cold. Now we’re on the pavement, back at day one of our careers."
"‘It’s a top security situation and you’re part of it,’ Lesley said."
"The human race is in serious need of good brains like yours. D’you hear me?"
"‘But that’s awful, Guido. That’s a real waste of talent,’ Justin complained, as Guido’s smile began to dawn."
"‘He wants to die like his father and the signora,’ his mother complained."
"‘"All the good people are in Heaven," he tells me. "All the bad people stay behind." Am I a bad person, Signor Justin? Are you a bad person?’"
"He doesn’t eat, doesn’t take his medicine. Refuses school. Even the computer must die."
"‘Words like lesbianism and homosexuality do not exist in African languages.’– Moi, 1995."
"‘Homosexuality is against African norms and religions and even in religion it is considered a great sin.’– Moi, 1998."
"Every time I hear a pharma justifying its actions on the grounds of Humanity, Altruism, Duty to Mankind, I want to vomit."
"IN 93 CLINICAL TRIALS RESEARCHERS ENCOUNTERED 691 ADVERSE REACTIONS BUT REPORTED ONLY 39 TO THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF HEALTH."
"One third of the world’s population infected with the bacillus."
"In the United States incidence has increased by twenty per cent in seven years."
"One untreated sufferer transmits the disease on average to between ten and fifteen people a year."
"Health authorities in New York City have given themselves powers to incarcerate TB victims who do not willingly submit to isolation."
"TB kills more mothers than any other disease. In Africa, women always pay the price."
"‘It’s a message: Watch out, guys, this is serious,’ said Dr Marcos Espinal."