Quotes from Alan Furst

What was Trotsky's quote? "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

Before the war, most of the hospital nurses in the city had been nuns but they had fled to Franco-occupied territory and the wards were now staffed by the prostitutes of Madrid—their hair growing out black because the city's supply of peroxide was needed as antiseptic for the wounded.

Most of it meant nothing—the daily output of a grinding bureaucracy speaking to itself.

The real, true spring had arrived, the chestnut trees were in blossom, and the Boche could do nothing about it.

European starvation was rather more cunning and wore a series of clever masks: death came by drink, by tuberculosis, by the knife, by despair in all its manifestations.

I was as you are now. A peasant. I sought the world. Because the alternative was to spend the rest of my life looking up a plowhorse's backside.

Spying came to him as making love comes to other men. It is his belief, in fact, that his father may have had relations with the Okhrana, the czar's intelligence service, though his murder by the Turks was haphazard—simply one act in a village slaughter. But Avram knew them, whether they were Turkish Aghas or British officers, he always understood how they worked, where their vulnerabilities lay.

This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." All in Churchill's deep, rumbling, and fiercely inspiring voice.

Russia might be characterized as a wicked beast of a nation, but it was a very large beast, and sometimes it thrashed its tail.

when at last they'd had to admit to themselves that they'd made all the love they could, had been a last meal. Like

spies and journalists were fated to go through life together, and it was sometimes hard to tell one from the other. Their jobs weren't all that different: they talked to politicians, developed sources in government bureaux, and dug around for secrets.

There were moments when Szara suspected that many idealists drawn to Communism were, at heart, people with an appetite for clandestine life.

This work is, as I said, improvisation, so we use whoever's around, if we can trust them.

Without the daily texture of existence to occupy it, he learned, the human soul wavers, wanders, begins to feed upon itself, and, in time, disintegrates.

It was a great softening, night and day it continued, a water funeral for the dying winter.

Whether they loved each other or not, they were lovers. And he was damned if he'd see her sucked into this brutal business.

In return for their faithful service, they would receive Red Army food rations, which amounted to a generous ladle, twice daily, from a cauldron into which all appropriated food was thrown. The stew boiled twenty-four hours a day, a fatty broth of onions, roosters, rabbits, dead horse, turnips - whatever they happened on in the course of their collecting forays - the Red Army essentially lived off the countryside.

on chess] He had learned the moves, back in Vidin, from Levitzky the tailor, who called it "the Russian game." Thus, the old man pointed out, the weak were sacrificed. The castles, fortresses, were obvious and basic; the bishops moved obliquely; the knights—an officer class—sought power in devious ways; the queen, second-in-command, was pure aggression; and the king, heart of it all, a helpless target, dependent totally on his forces for survival.

I'm a diplomat, I make myself agreeable to some of the most vile people on earth

In the early dusk of winter, Mercier climbed into an Opel with German plates. The young driver called himself Stefan and said he was from an emigre family that had settled in Besancon. 'In thirty-three,' he added. 'The minute Hitler took power, my father got the suitcases down. He was a socialist politicians, and he knew what was coming. Then, after we settled in France, the people you work for showed up right away, they've kept me busy ever since.

At least, he thought, looking down at his feet, his socks were still in decent shape. It was the socks that went first. A whore he knew said that she only took customers whose socks were in good condition. One of Casson's fellow lodgers showed him how he used a pen to color in the skin that showed white in the holes.

Let me put it this way: I don't plan to retire. What would I do, become a brain surgeon? I mean, a brain surgeon can retire and write novels, but a novelist can't retire and do brain surgery - or at least he better not.

Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying

My grandmother, whom I adored, and who partly raised me, loved Liberace, and she watched Liberace every afternoon, and when she watched Liberace, she'd get dressed up and put on makeup because I think she thought if she could see Liberace, Liberace could see her.