The Spy Who Loved Me (James Bond, #10)

by Ian Fleming

And alone! But above all alone! ‘Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.’

Everyone doesn’t have to live in a heap. Painters, writers, musicians are lonely people. So are statesmen and admirals and generals. But then, I added to be fair, so are criminals and lunatics. Let’s just say, not to be too flattering, that true individuals are lonely. It’s not a virtue, the reverse if anything.

One ought to share and communicate if one is to be a useful member of the tribe.

From now on, on my travels, the human race must improve!

American life is completely dislocated by storms and snow and hurricanes. When American automobiles can’t move, life comes to a halt, and, when their famous schedules can’t be met, they panic and go into a kind of paroxysm of frustration, besieging railway stations, jamming the long-distance wires, keeping their radios permanently switched on for any crumb of comfort.

‘Kinder, Kirche, Küche’.

I might have realized, or at any rate guessed, that, at least among amateur women as opposed to prostitutes, there is no physical love without emotional involvement – over a long period, that is. Physical intimacy is halfway to love, and enslavement is much of the other half.

The true jungle of the world, with its real monsters, only rarely shows itself in the life of a man, a girl, in the street. But it is always there. You take a wrong step, play the wrong card in Fate’s game, and you are in it and lost – lost in a world you had never imagined, against which you have no knowledge and no weapons. No compass.

Love of life is born of the awareness of death, of the dread of it. Nothing makes one really grateful for life except the black wings of danger.

No woman had ever held this man. None ever would. He was a solitary, a man who walked alone and kept his heart to himself.

One should never send out black thoughts. They live on, like sound-waves, and get into the stream of consciousness in which we all swim.

‘Hals und Beinbruch!’

All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful.

He was only some kind of a spy, a spy who had loved me. Not even loved, slept with.

I thought that perhaps one ought to be a nudist. But perhaps only under forty.