The Innocent Quotes
"From the moment you got your clearance, your job here is to do what you’re told."
"The face was elusive. The more intensely he summoned it, the more provocative was its disintegration."
"Everything, but everything on this project is important, every detail."
"The effort of being polite was stifling, and aggression was, for him, emotionally impossible."
"He needed relief, how else could he clear his mind?"
"It was always certain to start like this. If he was honest with himself, he had to concede that he had always known it really, at some level."
"The more intensely he summoned it, the more provocative was its disintegration."
"All he knew for certain was the effect on himself of spending ninety minutes with her at a table in a dance hall."
"He had loved the face. Now the face was gone and all that remained was the love, with too little to feed on."
"You'll do as I say." He managed to suppress the interrogative.
"There's likely to be more than a hundred and fifty circuits in each cable."
"Let's sleep now. Then we'll have all the morning."
"I happened to be in your area so I thought I’d pop up and say hello."
"And why have you come to see me without the flower in the hair?"
"For the rest, the deed and its causes, the guilt, the evasion, he tried hard not to brood. That would solve nothing."
"He felt settled, proud, truly grown up at last."
"It was blissful ordinariness they settled for now."
"Only now, as he came to name them—shame, desperation, love—could he really claim them for his own and experience them."
"It was a luxury to ignore her. He felt settled, proud, truly grown up at last."
"The truth was he had had one unsuccessful minute in Glass’s office. He did not find it easy to fall into conversation with strangers."
"They felt themselves to be in love. When they were out walking, they compared themselves favorably with other young couples they saw."
"They could never regain the spirit of February and early March, when it had seemed possible to make their own rules and thrive independently."
"It was the song's self-pity that should have been hilarious. Instead, it made Leonard feel worldly, tragic, bigger somehow."
"I don’t want to sit down." He was enjoying his scene now.
"Carry on?" Her accent gave the familiar phrase a strange lilt.
"I’m saying that if you don’t want to help me get rid of him, then you can spend the evening with him."
"You want to throw him in the street, why don’t you just do that? Do it! Why can’t you just act?"
"Because he’s yours! You chose him, he was your husband."
"You want to sit by while I sort out the mess you’ve made of your past—"
"I thought you could do it. But no, you want to be jealous and scream and hit and rape like him and all the rest—"
"They have our letter of 1951. They found it. And our something, signed by both of us. You and me."
"He has his own place, he has a room. He only does this to make trouble."
"It’s my place," Maria was saying to Otto. "It’s mine! That’s the end of it. Now get out!"
"We have to be together, we have to have it clear. They’ll take us in separate rooms and look for contradictions."
"But this wasn’t like a fight in a pub. He attacked me, he could have killed me."
"We don’t have to tell them, we don’t say a thing. We take him out of here and put him where they don’t find him."
"I’ve been through all this, Marnham. You know the rules. This is madness. What do you think you’re doing?"
"We all have to make our own arrangements with the past."
"In my experience, men and women don’t ever really get to understand each other."
"I don’t want to consign this letter to the void."
"It won’t be the first I’ve written to you that received no reply."
"I’m losing my thread. There are too many things I want to tell you."
"We would probably need a flight to O’Hare, in Chicago, where we could pick up the local service."
"Later he would tell her the radio man’s name and remind her that Bob Glass did give a speech that night."
"And she would tell him about the jiving competition, of which he had no memory."
"They would return to Berlin together, that was the only way."