Complicity Quotes
"You hear the car after an hour and a half. During that time you've been here in the darkness, sitting on the small telephone seat near the front door, waiting."
"Then you just sat there, breathing carefully, thinking, keeping calm."
"You stand up and look through the spyhole in the broad wooden door."
"You're glad you didn't have to hurt the women."
"It's a clear cold October day, fresh and bright with a few puffy little clouds scudding above the mountains on the chilly breeze."
"The trees and hills look sharp and vivid in the slanting late-afternoon light, slopes and trunks coated yellow-orange or standing in their own shadows."
"I get stuck in a line of traffic and, after a couple of hairy overtakes which result in various people flashing their headlights at me and which are purely the result of the speed, I decide to slow down, stop shouting at people, accept my lot and enjoy the scenery."
"I start the car, feeling charged and alert and justified again, fully firing on all cylinders and just fizzing with the good great god-damn Gonzo juice of the determination to get down to that there nuclear submarine missile base and cover the story, as the blessed St Hunter would say."
"The door opens, towards you. You hear the Jag's engine purring away. The hall light comes on. He says, 'Here we are.'"
"Deep in the glens at Lix Toll there's another automotive roadside attraction standing outside the garage there; a bright yellow Land Rover about ten foot tall facing the road, not on wheels but on four black triangular tracks like the bastard cross of a Landy and a Caterpillar earth-mover."
"Aye, aye, but facts can be misleading out of context."
"But if you ask to do a Saturday special on whisky we do rather expect it to have something to do with the cratur itself, rather than read like a manifesto for Class War."
"You're a good journalist; you write well, you meet deadlines and I know you've had offers to go down south with an even wider brief and extra money, and both Andrew and I give you more leeway than some people here think you deserve."
"You simply have to cultivate a sense of proportion."
"What a stupid drug, what a completely useless fucking drug; no real hit after the first drag, highly addictive and lethal in all sorts of ways."
"It was a revelation, an epiphany; a sudden realisation that it was possible for matter - something there in front of you, in your hand, in your lungs, in your pocket - to take your brain apart and reassemble it in ways you hadn't thought of previously."
"This was better than religion, or this was what people always meant by religion! The whole point was that this worked!"
"It was my judgement that the interests of the West would best be served if the Iran-Iraq War went on for as long as possible."
"It's important; it shows that you are not just some nutter, and the extra risk lifts you onto another plane of chance and luck."
"In Tehran, in the main cemetery, they had a red fountain; a fountain of blood, to the martyrs who died in the war."
"Of course you are nervous, but not in the way you're implying."
"You'd have to be a bit of an idiot to just tell people that, wouldn't you?"
"I suppose you know what a blevey is, don't you?"
"That's right, Mr Colley. We did think of a policeman, serving or not."
"You wouldn't happen to know those codes, would you, Mr Colley?"
"I'm going crazy or I've become a fucking vampire or something."
"What are you talking about, you incredible cretin, Colley?"
"You're pissed," Al says, going back to his pint.
"I've had a traumatic day," I tell him, pulling my Drizabone about me. "Grilled by the fuzz."
"Thanks for coming for a drink, Al," I tell him, looking into his eyes with drunken sincerity.
"You're my only pal who isn't another fucking hack."
"Heading for the hills, I'm fucking telling you ..."
"I don't think I could have done what you did, in the Falklands."
"So I'm more of a fucking man because I learned how to kill people, and did?"
"Nightmares about being blown to fuck by a missile, ten years ago."
"God, I hate it when my shit smells of whisky."
"Isn't friendship and love what it's really all about?"
"I make Inverness Airport in ninety minutes, through showers of hail towed under tall, grey clouds."
"Velocity is important. Kinetic energy frees the brain and confuses the enemy."
"When in doubt it's vitally important to keep moving."
"There have to be rules, laws, for everything; after all, there are even rules for war."
"I don't know how they've done it but the typography on the signs makes me want to pronounce the word Edin-burg, and I live in the place, for God's sake."
"Christ in a bucket: independent bastarding deterrent, The Genuine Shit Article."
"On Ferry Road, within sight of Fettes School's preposterous spire and only minutes from the police HQ, I have the first cigarette of the day, not because I really want it, just to feel bad."
"This turns out to be smart thinking in a way because when I get to Cop Central they promptly arrest me."
"The old motorbikes, tables, chairs and carpets in the ballroom look like forlorn toys in some long-neglected doll's house."
"Rain beats softly against the windows: the only sound."
"The stairs from here to the top floor stretch upwards around the dilapidated grandeur of the stairwell."
"I'm trying not to get too dependent on him but it's hard not to."
"You said Andy was dead. Andy Gould. He was my best friend. He was my best friend and I didn't... fucking... kill him, all right?"
"It's a relief when the Terrorist Squad boys seem to lose interest but that still leaves all the rest and I can't think I can't think straight I can't sleep."
"I am surrounded by selfish bastards I thought were my friends."
"William drank too much; fell asleep at a really frustrating point."
"This is the trickle-down effect in action, is it?"
"A shop is just a shop, but a museum is, well, glamorous."
"Don't let your head get turned by all this shit."
"You're the excitement in my life; you do things for me William couldn't even imagine."
"People might be a bit more polite if everybody carried guns."
"It's evolution; when we still lived in caves we used to go out and hunt and whoever brought back the mammoth or whatever ate the best meat and got to fuck the women, and all that was good for the human race."
"I just want to be sure that there'll be one stupid incompetent fuck less in the world."
"It must be me. Lefty journalist goes loco, wastes right-wingers."
"I'm almost looking forward to prison; plenty of dope in there, if I'm allowed to mix with other inmates."
"You may well look frightened, boy, because you're in deep bloody trouble."
"There are no clean rooms for morality, Cameron, no boys in bubbles kept in a guilt-free sterile zone."
"We're born free of sin and free of guilt. It's just that we all catch it, eventually."
"I believe we're born free of sin and free of guilt. It's just that we all catch it, eventually."
"There are monasteries and nunneries, and people become recluses, but even that's just an elegant way of giving up."
"Washing one's hands didn't work two thousand years ago, and it doesn't work today."
"But anyway, Cameron, you're still part of it. You've still played your part in it. Like me; like all of us."
"It's finally over, it's out, people know, other people know; the police know, it's no longer just between me and Andy, it's public."
"I do feel some relief, no matter what happens now, but I still feel I have betrayed Andy, regardless of what he's done."
"And maybe he's settling old scores while he can, before they're warned, too."
"I think this is the most peaceful place I have ever been."
"I'm becoming something of a connoisseur of interview rooms and this one definitely wouldn't rate a star."
"He's disillusioned. He used to have lots of illusions, and now he's got only one: that what he's doing will make any difference."
"I'd get to a doctor about that cough," McDunn says, sounding concerned."
"We could be buried together," William says, sounding happy.
"We all look slightly ridiculous because as well as our formal black clothes all of us sport Wellington boots - some black, most green - to deal with the mud-slicked grass of the island."
"She turns away from him and from William and from me and puts her hands up over her face."
"I have to admit the idea of Andy paying a visit had occurred to me as well, after that I LIED."
"I feel suddenly vulnerable and mortal and even old. I've given up smoking."
"I stood on the sunless desert, beneath a sky black from horizon to horizon, a rolling, heavy sulphurous sky made solid and soiled, packed with the thick, stinking effluence squeezed erupting from the earth's invaded bowels."
"My body shook, my ears rang, my eyes burned, my throat was raw with the acid-bitter stench of the evaporating crude, but it was as though the very ferocity of the experience unmanned me, unmade me and rendered me incapable of telling it."
"The black, charred boot was a couple of meters away, half-buried in the sand. When I picked it up it was surprisingly heavy because it still had the foot inside it."
"I filed a minimum of uninspired war-is-hell-and-frankly-so-is-peace-if-you're-female-out-here stories from the hotel."
"The lap-top sat on my knee, screen reflecting the grey overcast, the cursor winking slowly at the top-left edge of the blank display."
"I shook my head and stood up, twisting back to dust my pants."
"And, even though at the time I knew it was wrong, unjustifiable and a feeble, contemptible piece of self-important self-pity, for a while, under that withering deluge of professional contempt, I felt like something trapped and pulverised amongst the dust and greasy ashes on the Basra road."
"We're all guilty, Cameron; some more than others, some a lot more than others, but don't tell me we aren't all guilty."