Robert Harris > Quotes

“To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.”
― Robert Harris

“To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.”
― Robert Harris, Pompeii

“Cicero smiled at us. 'The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than destory one's spirit by worrying about them too far in advance. Especially tonight.”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too hot, too cold, too early, too late. I had learned over the years to ignore them all, and simply to start.”
― Robert Harris, The Ghost

“Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason”
― Robert Harris, Pompeii

“People will perish, but books are immortal. (Pompeii)”
― Robert Harris

“A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.”
― Robert Harris, The Ghost

“By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.”
― Robert Harris, Enigma

“You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“The natural impulse of men is to follow and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate.”
― Robert Harris

“But clever people all make one mistake. They all think everyone else is stupid. And everyone isn't stupid. They just take a bit more time, that's all.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“Tak usah cemas, akan banyak waktu untuk tidur setelah kita mati.”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“The art of life is to deal with one's problems as they arise; rather than destoy your spirit by worrying about them too far in advance.”
― Robert Harris

“Death solves all problems - no man, no problem. - J. V. Stalin, 1918”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“Politics? Boring? Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men's souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses? Boring? You might as well say that life itself is boring!”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“It was an unnatural time to be awake, ... It meant nothing good. He associated it with emergency, bereavement, conspiracy, flight; the sad skulk away at the end of a one-night affair.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“Gratitude", he said, quoting Stalin, "is a dog's disease.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“Have you ever seen fishermen when a storm is brewing on a great river? I have seen them many a time. In the face of a storm one group of fishermen will muster all their forces, encourage their fellows and boldly put out to meet the storm: 'Cheer up, lads, hold tight to the tiller, cut the waves, we'll pull her through!' But there is another type of fishermen - those who, on sensing a storm, lose heart, begin to snivel and demoralise their own ranks: 'What a misfortune, a storm is brewing; lie down, boys, in the bottom of the boat, shut your eyes; let's hope she'll make the shore somehow.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“But only a fool sails into combat with nature”
― Robert Harris, Pompeii

“Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.”
― Robert Harris, Fatherland

“What was leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason?”
― Robert Harris, Pompeii

“Travel is sold as freedom, but we were about as free as lab rats. This is how they'll manage the next Holocaust, I thought, as I shuffled forward in my stockinged feet: they'll simply issue us with air tickets and we'll do whatever we're told”
― Robert Harris, The Ghost

“Ich stellte mir seine Gedanken als einen schnellen, schmalen Wasserstrom vor, der sich durch die Fugen eines gefliesten Bodens bewegte - erst vorwärts, dann nach links und rechts ausgreifend, an einem Punkt kurz innehaltend, in eine andere Richtung weiter vorstoßend, sich immer weiter ausbreitend und verzweigend und dabei in seiner schimmernden, flüssigen Bewegung all die kleinen Möglichkeiten, Kosequenzen und Wahrscheinlichkeiten bedenkend.”
― Robert Harris, Imperium

“Surely the greatest mercy granted us by Providence is our ignorance of the future. Imagine if we knew the outcome of our hopes and plans, or could see the manner in which we are doomed to die - how ruined our lives would be! Instead we live on dumbly from day to day as happily as animals. But all things must come to dust eventually. No human being, no system, no age is impervious to this law; everything beneath the stars will perish; the hardest rock will be worn away. Nothing endures but words.”
― Robert Harris, Lustrum

“His scars and his tattoos were the medals of his lifetime. He was proud to wear them.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“Where was the respect? The boys all looked like girls and the girls all looked like whores. Clearly, the country was already halfway in the shit.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“You always knew if a film was out of synch, however fractionally; you always knew if someone fancied you, however improbably; and you always knew when someone was on your tail.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“Quod volimus credimus libenter
we always believe what we want to believe”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“Nothing is more important to a nation than its history. It is the earth upon which any society stands.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“Kelso's hangover had gone, to be replaced by that familiar phase of post-alcoholic euphoria - always in the past, his most productive time of day - a feeling that alone was enough to make getting drunk worthwhile.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“From the subjective perspective, he may seem cruel, even wicked. But the glory of the man is to be found in the objective perspective.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“Acceptance. That, he had learned in Russia many years ago, was the secret of survival. ... Accept it. Wait. Let the system exhaust itself. Protest will only raise your blood pressure.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“He felt more human with his boots on. A man can face the world with something on his feet.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“Right, you see that girl over there, the one in that group that keeps looking right at you?'...'Right, let's say I'm convinced she's wearing black knickers - she looks like a black knickers kind of gal to me - and I'm so sure that's what she's wearing, so positive of that sartorial fact, I want to bet a million dollars on it. The trouble is, if I'm wrong, I'm wiped out. So I also bet she's wearing knickers that aren't black, but are any one of a whole basket of colours - let's say I put nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that possibility: that's the rest of the market; that's the hedge. This is a crude example, okay, in every sense, but hear me out. Now if I'm right, I make fifty K, but even if I'm wrong I'm going to lose fifty K, because I'm hedged. And because ninety-five per cent of my million dollars is not in use - I'm never going to be called on to show it: the only risk is in the spread - I can make similar bets with other people. Or I can bet it on something else entirely. And the beauty of it is I don't have to be right all the time - if I can just get the colour of her underwear right fifty-five per cent of the time I'm going to wind up very rich...”
― Robert Harris, The Fear Index

“... black-eyed patrons sucking down Evians. Get laid and see someone get shot.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“Always, all my life: the old time.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“This was the problem with drinks parties: getting stuck with a person you didn't want to talk to while someone you did was tantalisingly in view.”
― Robert Harris, The Fear Index

“Time. Now here is a peculiar commodity, boy. The measurement of time. Best accomplished, obviously, with a watch. But, lacking a watch, a man may use instead the ebb and flow of light and dark. Lacking, however, a window through which to see such movement, the reliance must be devolved upon some inner mechanism of the mind. But if the mind has received a shock, the mechanism is disturbed, and time becomes as the ground is to a drunkard, variable.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“A dog looks up to you, a cat looks down on you, but a pig looks you straight in the eye.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“If you are afraid of wolves, keep out of the woods. - J. V. Stalin, 1936”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“She didn't say goodbye. She set off up the street, dodging the pedestrians, walking fast. He watched her, waiting to see if she might look back. But of course she didn't. He knew she wouldn't. She wasn't the looking-back kind.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“You are a bird of ill-omen, thought Kelso. You circle the world and wherever you land there is famine and death and destruction: in an earlier and less credulous age, the local citizens would have gathered at the first sight of you and driven you off with stones -”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“In the concealed darkness of the bag her fingers began to work her rosary, clumsily at first but with increasing dexterity - Push. Click. Slide. Press -”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“Got pregnant twice. Had two abortions. (And not many days had gone by since when she hadn't wondered what they might have been like, those two - and whether they could have been any more clamorous than the spaces they'd left behind.)”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“What she needed was someone who would take her for the whole night. Someone decent and respectable, with an apartment of his own. But how could you ever judge what men were really like? It was the young ones with the swaggering walks and the loud mouths who ended up bursting into tears and showing you pictures of their girlfriends. It was the bespectacled bankers and lawyers who liked to knock you around.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“... he tried to visualise her apartment, but he couldn't do it, he didn't know enough about her.”
― Robert Harris, Archangel

“History wasn't made without taking risks, that much he knew. So maybe sometimes you had to take risks to write it, too?”
― Robert Harris, Archangel