Status Updates From The Ministry of Fear

… don’t pity me. Pity is cruel. Pity destroys. Love isn’t safe when pity’s prowling around.

One can't love humanity. One can only love people .

The experience was as new to him as adolescent love:he had the blind passionate innocence of a boy:like a boy he was driven relentlessly towards inevitable suffering,loss and despair,and called it happiness.

The German are wonderfully thorough ,” Johns said. …. Everything forgiven and forgotten , or the Public Prosecutor. … They formed , you know , a kind of Ministry of Fear – with the most efficient under-secretaries. It isn’t only that they get a hold on certain people. It’s the general atmosphere they spread , so that you can’t depend on a soul.

A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man …. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous.

There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn't possess.

But it is impossible to go through life without trust; that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself .

"You say you killed for pity;why don't you have pity on yourself ?" Why not indeed ? except that it is easier to kill someone you love than to kill yourself.

Wow. A perfect book: accessible, clever, beautifully written, evocative, and quietly profound.

You were the sort of man I thought I could deal with quite easily until you lost your memory. That didn't work out right. You got so many illusions of grandeur, heroism, self-sacrifice, patriotism.....

This wasn't an exciting adventure, and he wasn't a hero, and it was even possible that this was not a tragedy. Anna's brother is sleeping. Out of hearing. He sleeps so sound. That's economy too. As deep and as little of it....

Book Four: The Whole Man

Arthur withholding the phone number so he can be the hero in his own adventure story and show off to Anna. Wrong numbers all, until....

Jones's belongings buried on the island. Rowe was growing up; every hour was bringing him closer to hailing distance of his real age. The simple heroics of childhood blurring and receding.

Damn, this is good

Book Three: Bits and Pieces

I must stand up - as though there were some healing virtue in remaining on his feet as his brain reels with the horror if returning life.

Consummate writing as Digby/Arthur breaks out into "the Sick Bay".

My dear Digby, you are a very sick man.

Magnificent - so imaginative, and with a palpable sense of dread and unease running throughout.

Arthur Rowe is now Richard Digby in some kind of sanitorium but here's Anna Hilfe who calls him "Arthur".

Then, as the sirens took up their nightly wail, he opened the lid of the suitcase... ..the end of Book One: The Unhappy Man. Here goes with Book Two: The Happy Man

It was Anna Hilfe - she's come to see Arthur Rowe