Quotes from Helen MacInnes

Edward Fane climbed heavily into bed, with the boredom of a man who has long learned to expect no pleasure there.

grace that her training had made natural for her. Did she ever think of ballet, now? Madame Aleksander wondered.

He passed the first six houses with sadness rather than distaste. They tried so hard, he thought. The Crescent in Edinburgh had been a row of houses all very much alike, too. But similarity, when it has money behind it, becomes a solid wall of convention, of permanence, even of defiance. Similarity, conceived and born in poverty, becomes an inferiority complex.

It seemed monstrous that people who could only afford cheap houses should find themselves automatically surrounded by ugliness.

Once Burns had admitted frankly that the most difficult thing he had to learn at Oxford was the English. What was it that David had said last summer? 'We are becoming a nation of professional eccentrics. Foreigners provide us with a stage, and we enjoy our little appearances all the more because we convince everyone, including ourselves, that we don't even notice the audience.

Streets are like children, David thought; the small ones go to bed first.

There are good people, kind people, too. I've got to keep thinking of them. I've got to remember them. There are people who help. Not only people who destroy.

I resent this man. Why should the happiness of the whole civilised world depend on him?

He had been there to warn Dutka's wife and boy. It was an idea of his own, but it worked. They got away." "The captain? Thaddeus?" "The Germans were still searching when I left. The searchlights had been brought up." "There's a chance, isn't there, Jan?" "There's always a chance." But his voice was heavy, and his shoulders drooped. Sheila's next question about Korytów

remember the name of the firm which he owned. She

It is just that I am tired of being told I look at life too simply. It isn't naïve to believe that good exists, that evil exists. I have known both of them. I've seen them. I've felt them. They aren't just ideas that you can twist into neat phrases. They aren't words to be clever with. They are too vital. We live by them. Or else we make everything meaningless.

Yes, the Americans and the British were alike in some things. They were surface people, skimming over past history, picking out the interpretations that pleased them, never digging deep for the truths that could warn them. When they found something unpleasant, they would forget it within months. They even prided themselves on not remembering; forget and forgive were so much easier. They evaded serious ideas, unless they approved of them.

head. "You will not tell?" She shook her head again. "But how else can we believe you? You mean you are willing to be shot as a spy rather than give his name?" "Would his name

You could reason out that adults did not have to explain to each other, but instinct was so often more accurate than reasoning.

of plans and hasty departure.