Quotes from Philip Kerr

Can you imagine how much of existence would be impossible if people didn't believe in a certain amount of luck in the face of all evidence to the contrary? The true essence of human life is delusion. That's what we've got in here. And it's been that way ever since the first Roman soldier blew on a handful of dice. It's simple human nature to believe your luck is going to turn.

against the

You're hard enough to ice skate on

But I now had a keener appreciation of why people became Nazis in the first place; perhaps it was like he said: that they wanted to get away from dead-end, no-account places like Saarbrücken, wanted to achieve some sort of status among their fellow men, wanted their shitty, insignificant lives to mean something, even if they could find that meaning only in being mean to others—Jews, mostly, but anyone who didn't agree with them would do.

I was never one for looking at beautiful scenery, and certainly not since 1933; it distracts from the more important and admittedly metropolitan business of keeping an eye out for the Gestapo, which, with my politics, is an ever-present dilemma.

Loud songs do not a patriot make.

In my experience, Corporal, the best police work looks like nothing at all and is always soon forgotten." I

Her perfume already had me by the knot in my tie and was gently kicking my brain around inside my skull.

Americans were different: even after they'd dropped a couple of atom bombs on the Japs, they still wanted to be liked. Which struck me as just a little naive.

No wonder Van Gogh cut his ear off, I thought; there's nothing else to do in a place like this but cut your ear off.

The colonel stood up. "I hope you enjoy your trip to Uruguay. Its government is stable, democratic, and politically mature. There's even a welfare state. Of course, the people are entirely European in origin. I believe they exterminated all the Indians. As a German, you should feel very much at home there.

You read much, Bernie?' 'More and more,' I admitted. 'And for me it's like the French Foreign Legion. I do it to forget. Myself, I think.

pendant lower lip, as if daring you to smack him

I tell you that PFC Ivanov has made a number of allegations regarding the treatment of Red

Nuremberg.' 'Well sir, it's this. It has crossed my mind that someone might be trying to sew the Jews into a very nasty body-bag.' Now the general raised an

The older I got the less I cared about anything.

Es un silencio nacido de la vergüenza, porque incluso los inocentes son culpables. Despojado de todo derecho humano, el hombre vuelve a convertirse en un animal.

You've got me confused with some kind of saint, Noreen. The kind who's OK with being martyred as long as his halo's straight in the photograph. If I'm going to throw myself to the lions, I want it to mean a lot more than just being remembered in some milkmaid's prayers on a Sunday morning. I never was a man for a useless gesture.

The interesting thing about the rich is that they like being told where to get off. They confuse it with honesty

There's only one thing that unnerves me more than the company of an ugly woman in the evening, and that's the company of the same ugly woman the following morning.

Do you have a mother?" "Naturally I used to have one," I said. "A father, too, if memory serves. Only somewhere along the way I seem to have lost them both. Careless of me.

Uki Goni's excellent book The Real Odessa for much of my information about Nazis in Argentina.

Frau Lange, her chins and her dog were waiting for me on the same chaise longue, except that it had been recovered with a shade of material that was easy on the eye only if you had a piece of grit in there on which to concentrate.

It's the very absurdity of the British which makes them so impossible to radicalize. And why we should envy them.