The Silent Man Quotes
"A weaker man would have found Shamir Taghi’s pain unbearable."
"For all the good the pills did him, they might as well have been filled with sugar."
"There were no words for it. But it would be ending soon."
"No morphine or hydrocodone for him. Those were expensive drugs, and he was a poor man."
"What driver would take on a tanker loaded with eight thousand gallons of gasoline?"
"He felt as though he were being cut open from the inside out, tiny claws tearing apart his ribs."
"In fact, as he looked at his right wrist he saw a bone poking through his skin."
"Hanging from the seat, coughing blood, awaiting the inevitable, Nepetrov began to sing."
"The crash killed Shamir instantly. Nepetrov wasn’t so lucky."
"The tanker didn’t have an automatic fire protection system or the other safety equipment standard on its cousins in Western Europe and the United States."
"The whole of the Russian army would be chasing them."
"The answer, they knew, was that they would most likely feel nothing at all."
"But no matter where he turned, she was gone."
"He felt as he did playing chess when an opponent found a weakness and counterattacked, leaving him naked."
"As if God had anything to do with this game they were playing."
"He felt sharp and strong, as if he’d burned through the first rapid-fire moves of a chess match."
"He knew he should be ashamed, but he wasn’t, not a bit."
"Now he wanted revenge, the revenge that he had promised the masked man in his bedroom that night."
"He couldn’t imagine ever being with anyone else."
"But since Wells had come back from China, she’d begun to pull away from the CIA."
"She would take as much of him as he could give."
"I believe they’re laughing at us," Wells said. "That bike is probably worth ten times as much as this thing."
"If we’d taken my bike we’d be there already."
"Who rides a motorcycle when it’s thirty degrees?"
"Nothing blocks the wind in weather like this."
"Not unless there’s something you think we need to be concerned about," Wells said.
"Then it’s all right. We can wait like everybody else."
"It’s a solid ship. And there’s a lot of us running around looking for leaks."
"Jenny. Check your mirror. Do you see a motorcycle?"
"The traffic inched forward. On his side, the red bike was now only about three car lengths behind."
"I never knew before. But two days with you have shown me. There’re only two kinds of people in the world."
"Those who can keep their thoughts to themselves," Yusuf said.
"But you promised, and I’ve done everything you asked."
"You knew how this would end, Grigory. It’s the same for all of us."
"I should have turned you in." So many chances, so many wrong choices.
"Is this about the chess?" Grigory couldn’t stop himself.
"Lie down. On your stomach with your hands above your head."
"Fiancée?" Shafer whispered as the nurse walked away. "Was it a special invisible ring?"
"We didn’t tell anyone. Just her kids. Not even our exes yet."
"That you love her. And that she’s going to be fine."
"Of course it’s yours. You know I don’t deny you."
"Pierre, I could have handled this myself. You know why I let you?"
"You loved it. And then one day you just stopped. You never did tell us why."
"Filthy cur. Go back to Shula and never touch a girl in Ghazaliya again. We don’t want your fleas."
"Not what they've done to you, but what you'll do to them."
"The key with them was never to show weakness. They were wolves, these men. If they smelled doubt or fear, they would turn instantly."
"I can't promise success. But it's not impossible."
"It's what the Americans said when they blew up the first bomb."
"Why this word? Don't you see? It's a joke. Such a powerful weapon, and they call it a gadget."
"No customs agent ever even looked at the container."
"This is how most of them live. Especially outside Moscow."
"He saved me from Mobutu. Maybe in Zaire he was God."
"Who but gamblers, drug smugglers, and spies needed a bill worth almost $1,000?"
"And last I checked, France had a second-rate economy and a third-rate army."
"He'd always trusted his instincts, but this time they'd betrayed him."
"He considered buying Exley some official Russian Olympic gear."
"All right. We'll save that for another time."
"If I die of a heart attack, do you think our American friend will call us even?"
"The field turned into a wide Baghdad street, rising toward an overpass."
"He wondered if any spy manual anywhere mentioned tanning salons."
"Who else should I ask? The Americans? The Jews?"
"If I don't get it, I'm no worse off than before."
"You’ve lost your way. You’ve lost the faith and you’ll pay."
"We’ll protect you, we’ll tell everybody you had PTSD and snapped."
"I’m sorry, Vinny. Three guys dead and I didn’t even get the one I came for."
"You may think you want to stop, but you’re way past that now."
"Without it, you’re just a stone-cold killer."
"We’re the reason you can look in the mirror and say, I did it all for the good guys."
"You can never stop us, America. For a thousand years, we have died for Islam. If we must, we will die for a thousand more. Nothing frightens us."
"The shortest path to freedom is the path that sheds blood far and wide. And we are not afraid of blood."
"Remember that we Muslims want to live in peace with you. We have blown up this bomb because you’ve given us no choice."
"The great virtue of the design was its simplicity. If the bomb came together quickly enough and had enough uranium, it couldn’t help but go off."
"You think killing a million people is going to help the cause? You think you’re going to roll back a thousand years of progress?"
"We’d be better off if we stopped stamping ‘Top Secret’ on every page of dreck we write."
"Be careful what you wish for. These days Purdy was sorry he’d ever gotten the job."
"I’m sure I don’t need to tell you the urgency of ensuring that we never have a nuclear event on Russian or American soil."
"The only way we can be sure we’ll get a full detonation. But if we can, imagine it. The whole American government is there. All gone."
"A ship that had to be found quickly, so its hold could be searched with Geiger counters, its crew questioned, and its captain put in a rubber room and subjected to every interrogation technique that the dark wizards of the CIA had ever invented."
"This was the kind of problem the United States knew how to solve, a technical puzzle that could be cracked with pure effort and brainpower."
"The camera capable of both super-wide and super-fine resolution hadn’t been invented yet."
"By morning, they’d created an application that turned the agency’s face-recognition software into a crude boat-recognition program."
"I don’t mean to be a stickler, but under what authority, sir? This is open ocean and they’ve got as much right to be on it as we do."
"And then when a helicopter buzzed it, it turned out to be a freighter that had been built by the same Korean shipyard as the Juno."
"If we don’t move now, we’re going to lose everything."
"Why, when it is said to you, Go and fight in God’s way, do you dig your heels in the earth?"
"We need to find these men before they blow this bomb. Or it’s over. Understand?"
"He just closed his eyes and saw the tiger in the Cairo zoo. And, sure enough, the pain rose like the whine of a teakettle and then disappeared."
"Time is it? Eight. Six hours. He’d been out longer than he thought."
"These guys. The odds are bad, yes. Not impossible, but bad."
"You know, I’ll go home, wait for you. You don’t even have to come."
"You haven’t seen Evan in how long? And you don’t have me, John. You don’t."
"But even before he could imagine Grant and Lee and the armies in blue and gray, the fields were gone."
"You just have this,_ Exley had said. He didn’t want to believe her, but she was right."
"They stopped, waiting for traffic to clear so they could join the traffic on Vairo Boulevard."
"His mouth was dry, his fingers gnarled. If his hunch was wrong, he might be about to shoot an innocent college student."