Alan Furst > Quotes

“Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying”
― Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw

“There's a French saying, ‘Où le Dieu a vous semé, il faut savoir fleurir.’ Let's see, ‘Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower'...”
― Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw

“One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.”
― Alan Furst, The World at Night

“Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus: the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said”
― Alan Furst, Dark Star

“But the world doesn't run on logic, it runs on the seven deadly sins and the weather. - Alan Furst; Red Gold”
― Alan Furst

“Live today, for tomorrow we die.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen.”
― Alan Furst, Mission to Paris

“This land, like so much of the French countryside, was a painting, but Mercier felt his heart touched with melancholy and realized, not for the first time, that beautiful places were hard on lonely people.”
― Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw

“And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini's armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn't sure what came next. So, don't trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.”
― Alan Furst, Spies of the Balkans

“When you are done living for yourself, only then do you learn that living for others is the privilege,’ Renata”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“This year, of course, being 1936, there would be no figs.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Well, he thought, one did what one had to do, so life went. No, one did what one had to do in order to do what one wanted to do - so life really went.”
― Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw

“The sun?" Goldman said in an unguarded moment. "I hear they've shot it.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“When you're looking for somebody and you find yourself in contact with people you've never met, you are getting close.”
― Alan Furst, Red Gold

“Earlier, during a lull in business, Morath had laid out the details of Kolovitzky’s letter and the two of them had discussed strategy, coming up with the plan that couldn’t go wrong and what to do once it did. In”
― Alan Furst, Kingdom of Shadows

“The lawyer Thien, when Morath was ushered into his office by a junior member of the staff, turned out to be an ancient bag of bones held upright only by means of a stiff, iron-coloured suit.”
― Alan Furst, Kingdom of Shadows

“He ate a ghastly blutwurst in the dining car, finished Bartha, managed to buy a copy of Est, the evening edition brought in from Budapest, at the station buffet in Brno. Clearly, political life was heating up. Two members of parliament had come to blows. At a workers’ march in the Tenth District, bricks thrown, people arrested. To the Editor. Sir: How can we let these liberal pansies run our lives? An editorial called for “strength, firmness, singleness of purpose. The world is changing, Hungary must change with it.” A coffeehouse by the university had burned down. TENS OF THOUSANDS CHEER HITLER SPEECH IN REGENSBURG. With photograph, on page one. Here they come, Morath thought.”
― Alan Furst, Kingdom of Shadows

“With time, he developed the instincts of a priest: evil existed; the task was to work productively within its confines.”
― Alan Furst, Dark Star

“He was, in military life, a sergeant. Casson had already guessed that by the time he got around to mentioning it. A sergeant: good at getting things done. By the book so long as it worked. By being crooked if that's what it took.”
― Alan Furst, Red Gold

“A moment comes, and if you wish to look at yourself as human, you must take some kind of action. Otherwise, you can read the newspapers and congratulate yourself on your good fortune.”
― Alan Furst, Dark Star

“It made her—a bizarre trick—long for a past that was still in the future.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.”
― Alan Furst, The Foreign Correspondent

“A certain type—he knew them all too well from years of experience as a detective, he knew how they acted, how they spoke, how their minds worked. These were people who would do anything to win at what they saw as the game of life, who had no allegiance to anyone or anything beyond themselves, who were gifted liars, who could scheme their way into almost anyone’s confidence, then betray them without hesitation.”
― Alan Furst, A Hero of France

“There is an enormous body of literature, fiction and nonfiction, written about the period 1933–1945, so Alan Furst’s recommendations for reading in that era are very specific. He often uses characters who are idealistic intellectuals, particularly French and Russian, who become disillusioned with the Soviet Union but still find themselves caught up in the political warfare of the period. “Among the historical figures who wrote about that time,” Furst says, “Arthur Koestler may well be ‘first among equals.’ ” Furst suggests Koestler’s Darkness at Noon as a classic story of the European intellectual at midcentury.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“In the ruined beds of a hundred rooms spread across the lost quarters of Europe, her ghost lay with him every night.”
― Alan Furst, Dark Star

“We are afflicted with a darkness of the soul and fall in love with our pain.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“For Mercier, it was the ceremony of the mass that eased his soul: the sweetish smoke trailing from the censer, the ringing of the bell, the Latin incantations of the priest. In Warsaw, he attended early mass, at a small church near the apartment, once or twice a month, confessing to his vocational sins – duplicity, for example – in the oblique forms provided by Catholic protocol. He’d grown up an untroubled believer, but the war had put an end to that. What God could permit such misery and slaughter? But, in time, he had found consolation in a God beyond understanding and prayed for those he’d lost, for those he loved, and for an end to evil in the world.” ― Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw”
― Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw

“When a diplomat says ‘yes’ he means ‘maybe.’ When a diplomat says ‘maybe’ he means ‘no.’ But if a diplomat says ‘no’ he’s no diplomat.”
― Alan Furst, Midnight in Europe

“they’d”
― Alan Furst, Dark Voyage