The English Assassin Quotes
"Why couldn’t it have been something simple, like love letters from another woman?"
"Her husband was a monster, his life a lie—a complete and meticulously maintained lie."
"A good hole, she decided: about six feet in length and two feet across."
"He would never be able to use it again. This pleased her."
"The Stradivarius lay where she had dropped it."
"I see no need to involve the police in the personal matters of this family."
"How can she play at a time like this? I’m afraid she knows little else."
"One doesn’t betray one’s adopted country, one’s college, or one’s regiment."
"We won’t pay you a pound. Your name will never appear in our files."
"But he can’t walk a straight line. After what happened to his wife and child in Vienna."
"Our Lady seemed an island of melancholia in a sea of wild debauchery."
"The Portuguese villagers, who had never seen a woman slapping a man, applauded wildly."
"She picked at her food; she drank her wine as though it was something that was expected of her."
"With little else to do that summer, the villagers set out to finally learn the name and occupation of the mysterious woman from the hillside."
"Once again he braced himself, but tonight only music exploded."
"Tonight, things are good. The weather is fine, the vineyards are ready for winter, and Our Lady of the Hillside is playing her sonata again."
"He could never get over the fact that Anna was a star and he was not."
"Anna did not believe in curses. Things happened for a reason."
"Well, it all came crashing down, didn’t it? The invasion of the Low Countries started on May tenth. By June fourteenth, the Germans had entered Paris."
"Two days after Hitler’s victory tour of Paris, he ordered all works of art owned by Jews to be transferred to German hands for so-called_safekeeping._ In reality, the plunder of France was on."
"There were several, but the most important was a unit called the ERR: the_Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg._ It was a formidable enterprise."
"The ERR commandeered the Musée Jeu de Paume and used it as a storage facility and sorting house. A large staff worked night and day to catalogue and appraise the massive amount of art that was falling into German hands."
"The Nazis considered them degenerate, but they weren’t about to let them get away without first extracting something in return. Most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century works were sold off to raise cash or set aside to be used in exchanges."
"Neutrality left the dealers and collectors of Switzerland in a unique position to capitalize on the rape of Paris. The Swiss were permitted to travel throughout much of Europe, and the Swiss franc was the world’s only universally accepted currency."
"They were brilliant, and thoroughly Swiss in subtlety. For example, if a person takes possession of an object in good faith, and that object happens to be stolen, it’s rightfully his after five years."
"The paintings can’t talk, but their provenance_can._ Clearly, Augustus Rolfe took his collecting very seriously. Even if he acquired the paintings under less than perfect circumstances, he would have insisted on a provenance for each one of them."
"I’ll be able to tell you whether he was a legitimate collector or whether the old bastard was sitting atop a vault filled with looted art."
"If I can give you one piece of advice, my dear boy, assume at all times that she knows more about her father and his collection than she’s telling you. Daughters tend to be very protective of their fathers, even when they think their fathers are complete bastards."
"A violinist can be replaced. But the Tintorettos are irreplaceable."
"When it's over, and everyone's safe, he'll find a nice quiet toilet where he can throw up his guts."
"Sometimes, a taddunaghiu can do good things. Sometimes, he can right a terrible wrong."
"A simple scale—G Minor played over two octaves, the ascent, the descent—was enough to send her through a mystical porthole to another time and place."
"I wouldn’t call it forgiveness. Accommodation. I’ve reached accommodation with myself."
"If you were a few years younger, I’d join you."
"She acted as though nothing bothers her. But she’s human after all."
"Why hand over the paintings now, Herr Rolfe? So many years have gone by."
"It’s more than a few paintings. Someone took them, and now I want them back."
"She was a lady, this Guarneri of Anna’s. Dignified and graceful, no flaws or failings, no scars."
"Her hand did not play the violin; it was her head that played. Her fingers would obey her brain."
"There was nothing she could do now to prepare further. The pieces were so embedded in her cells that she would play them not from memory but from instinct."
"I’m not sure I’m really ready to get back on the merry-go-round again, Fiona."
"She acknowledged the applause with a slight bow. If she ever looked at Gabriel, he did not know it, because by then he had turned his back to her and was scanning the room, looking for a man with a gun."
"Just because I am unable to lie with my wife does not mean that I am willing to give her body to others."
"He wished he could do for his face what he was about to do for the painting."
"The nature of your next life, I'm afraid, is somewhat less certain."
"We Swiss take our privacy rights very seriously."
"The Alps had absorbed the brunt of the storm. Bern and Zurich were spared."