Our Kind Of Traitor Quotes
"Seated head in hands at eight o'clock in the morning in his modest Oxford rooms, after a seven-mile run that had done nothing to ease his sense of calamity, he had searched his soul to know just what the first third of his natural life had achieved."
"His first name, traditionally the property of the English upper classes, derives from a rabble-rousing Methodist prelate of the nineteenth century named Arthur Peregrine of Huddersfield."
"Would Orwell have believed it possible that the same overfed voices which had haunted him in the 1930s, the same crippling incompetence, addiction to foreign wars and assumptions of entitlement, were happily in place in 2009?"
"I don’t like dons and I don’t like being one myself. I don’t like academia and if I never have to wear a bloody gown again, I’ll feel a free man."
"Hammering on about Byron, Keats and Wordsworth to a bunch of bored undergraduates whose highest ambition is to get a degree, get laid, and get rich? Done it. Been there. Fuck it."
"About the only thing that would really keep me in this country is a bloody revolution."
"He would teach set subjects, and any sport they cared to throw at him, to children who needed him as a lifeline to self-fulfilment rather than as a ticket to middle-class prosperity."
"Her father, a sweetly useless actor, had died prematurely of alcohol, sixty cigarettes a day and a misplaced passion for his wayward wife."
"The only son of Dora and Alfred would put himself where their convictions had been."
"But there was also Perry the closet sybarite who treated himself to unpredictable bursts of luxury before hurrying back to his garret."
"I thought he was heroic. I just didn’t know why."
"The house as we approached it from the back was a pile of old bones."
"It’s neither. It’s Perry showing them how brilliant he is at doing their job."
"For your protection – and read it over my shoulder."
"Let them give her all the normality they’ve got, because, oh mother, did she need normality."
"Standing in front of the non-functioning all-pine, do-it-yourself reproduction Georgian fireplace."
"Not utterly sure of anything, actually, darling."
"And when she reached the last flight, she had to haul herself up by the handrail."
"I’m not telling. I refuse to drag you any deeper into this affair than you are already."
"I’ll do what I do. They can do what they do. What’s wrong with that?"
"I have stumbled by chance on some information...unsolicited, unwanted and – secret."
"You gotta get the fuck outta the Indian stock market or you catch big cold."
"I make twenty million profit cold. The Jews are dead, the hostages are dead and I’m a fucking genius."
"I kill military apparatchik, maybe also Chekist. Why else they give me fifteen? I have honour. I am not –"
"It was for my mother who protect her children. Was for love of my crazy father who suicide himself."
"Therefore in Kolyma I am welcome prisoner. I am krutoi – good fellow, got no problems, pure."
"With fourteen I was goddam zek in Kolyma. Criminal, not political. Political is shit. Criminal is pure."
"We wait. We have time. We put our feelings on hold, we enjoy life, and we wait. That’s all we need to do."
"The young today, I mean one simply doesn’t know."
"Life goes on. It’s not just about when we arrive. It’s from then on: no questions of the affected party."
"Maybe not Roedean. They can’t promise that. Maybe there’s somewhere even better."
"If I wanna take Tamara a walk, I gonna take her."
"You play me Wimbledon once? Make it interesting?"
"Evil is evil, period. Not rooted in social circumstance."
"Compromise your noble principles for the greater good."
"You better marry that girl pretty quick, Professor – hear me?"