Spook Country Quotes
"Something in his intonation of the magazine’s name, just now, those audible italics, suggested something she knew she’d quickly tire of."
"Could you, she wondered, be staying in this hotel and technically still be considered homeless? It felt like you could, she decided."
"The air was full of the dry and stinging detritus of the palms."
"You are, she told herself, crazy. But that seemed for the moment abundantly okay."
"I had never touched the cards and folded papers the heat and movement of my body sueded so convincingly."
"The only Americans our grandfather knew in Havana were CIA."
"‘He doesn’t frighten me.’ Though really he wasn’t sure; fear was a part of it, but he didn’t seem to fear the old man himself."
"We all need lives, Tito, eventually, if we’re to stay here."
"The world outside the restaurant’s windows, beyond words in a red plastic Cantonese neither of them could read, was the color of a silver coin, misplaced for decades in a drawer."
"Milgrim heard the door click shut behind them."
"He was concentrating on the tiny tablet of Ativan melting beneath his tongue."
"‘Why do they call it that?’ Brown repeated, with a deliberate and ominous calm."
"‘Volapuk,’ said Milgrim, feeling the Ativan finally do its not-there trick."
"Milgrim held the flashlight where Brown wanted it, savoring the perspective being afforded by the Ativan."
"Milgrim watched Brown swap in the fresh battery, careful to keep the beam on what Brown was doing, and out of his eyes."
"Everything needs batteries, Milgrim thought."
"She lay there under a single white sheet, listening to the French girl’s robot bumping and clicking and reversing."
"She got out of bed and crossed to the window, hoping she wouldn’t step on the robot."
"She found Odile Richard waiting under the Standard’s white porte cochere and the hotel’s sign—displayed, for reasons known only to its designers, upside down."
"Maps were basic. Too basic for most people to get a handle on."
"Cyberspace was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction."
"Each blog is actually trying to describe reality."
"We’re all doing VR, every time we look at a screen."
"The world we walk around in would be channels."
"The slaves had been forbidden the worship of their home gods, so they had joined the Catholic Church and celebrated them as saints."
"The Frankfurt School had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia."
"The U.S. hundred is the international currency of bad shit, and by the same token the number-one target of counterfeiters."
"It sounds fascinating, Odile, but it will have to be another day. I need to make some notes. Absorb what I’ve seen so far."
"A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation."
"If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That’s why they call him ‘terrorist.’ He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society."
"I was saying these things without consciously having thought them, or at least not in such succinct terms, and they seemed inarguable."
"I can do a better job if you go into your own room."
"Are you really so scared of terrorists that you’ll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?"
"The truth is deep, cousin, and shifts, and runs away into the cracks, like the little balls of mercury we played with as children."
"Be seated. We wouldn’t want you injured, in case of a sudden stop."
"People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why? Because they have better stuff. No other reason."
"I felt it on his belt as he tried to hold me. I thought it might be a weapon."
"Are we inadvertently creating a monster, assigning him these things, facilitating him?"
"It's a remarkable system, not least because it actually would contribute to making the country safer."
"The flat country through which they followed the thin straight lines of highway was called Nebraska."
"Cities, in Milgrim’s experience, had a way of revealing themselves in the faces of their inhabitants, and particularly on their way to work in the morning."
"The city had been very quiet, as they drove in. Deserted. Scarcely a pedestrian. Strangely clean, lacking in texture, like video games before they’d learned to dirty up the corners."
"He knew that the moment, if there had ever been one, was past."
"He concentrated on breathing more regularly, and on preparing his excuse for having come uncuffed."
"People paid to have experiences like this, he thought, but it didn’t cheer him."
"Nature, for Milgrim, had always had a way of being too big for comfort."
"Son of a bitch, he said, with what Milgrim, amazed at all of this, took to be immense and inexplicable satisfaction."
"She slid off the Aztec altar, which moved slightly, and in a very strange way."
"Ignore sea, she told herself, mountains. Don’t look. Too much view."
"The argument had nothing to do with ethics, everything to do with quality of product, with not squandering potential assets."
"History was queer, thought Milgrim. Deeply so."
"Excuse me, while I play director of photography."
"Could you open the bag, please, and bring the scope?"
"Very nearly buggered. By that roof peak there. Look."
"Shit out of luck, if that roof were a foot taller."
"Dosimeter. Russian. Surplus. Excellent value."
"I turned on a jammer, when I took you upstairs. You might’ve been wearing a wire."
"Thirty-caliber. Ten-twist, four-groove barrel."
"One hundred million dollars. In a set of fake pallets, along the floor."
"To make it impossible to launder. The cesium. It wouldn’t come out in the wash."
"The worst really are full of passionate intensity now, aren’t they?"
"I’m concentrating on revolutionary messianism."
"She constitutes a sort of a gender preference unto herself."
"I’ve just seen someone, some people, do the single strangest thing I imagine I’ll ever see."
"A prank. A prank you’d have to be crazy to be able to afford."
"I’m happy to have found such a quiet and pleasant place."
"If it hasn’t turned up, I’ll need to do a little shopping."
"Your purse, or in any case the unit, are currently inside a Canada Post box."