Dark Star Quotes

“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

“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

“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

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

“they both believed that language was God's gift to liars,”
― Alan Furst, Dark Star

“On the subject of Jews the Nazis are like mad dogs. They will not be reasonable, and such blindness may ultimately destroy us all.”
― Alan Furst, Dark Star

“now we have a new pogrom, run, like so many in history, by a shrewd peasant who understands hatred, who knows its true value and how to use it.”
― Alan Furst, Dark Star

“His resolve had flowed away like sand on the outgoing tide. He sat on the running board of the Pobeda, slumped against the door, and stared out over the gray ponds and blowing reeds. He had somehow come to the end of his journey, the future he’d held out to himself no more than a trick of the illusionist, the self-deluded survivor. Against the vast background of the deserted land he saw his insignificance only too clearly—a vain, petty man, envious and scheming, an opportunist, a fraud. Why should such a man remain alive? Get in the car, he told himself. But the willful interior voice sickened him—all it knew was greed, all it did was want. Even here, at the end of the world, it sang its little song, and any gesture, no matter how absurd, would satisfy it. But the only act he could imagine called for removing the Steyr from beneath the driver’s seat of the automobile and relieving the earth of an unneeded presence—at least an act of grace.”
― Alan Furst, Dark Star

“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

“Luftmenschen were also eternal students, lost souls, young people who spent their lives arguing politics in cafés and drifting through the student communities of Europe— gifted, bright, but never truly finding themselves.”
― Alan Furst, Dark Star

“Having lived in a mythical country, a place neither here nor there, these intellectuals from Vilna and Gomel helped create another and called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Such a name! It was hardly a union. The Soviets - workers’ councils - ruled it for about six weeks; socialism impoverished everybody, and only machine guns kept the republics from turning into nations. But to Szarza and the rest it didn’t matter. He’d put his life on the line, preferring simply to die at the wrong end of a gun rather than the wrong end of a club, and for twelve years - until 1929, when Stalin finally took over - he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic, intellectual Jews actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer.”
― Alan Furst, Dark Star

“Whether they loved each other or not, they were lovers. And he was damned if he'd see her sucked into this brutal business.”
― Alan Furst, Dark Star

“There were moments when Szara suspected that many idealists drawn to Communism were, at heart, people with an appetite for clandestine life.”
― Alan Furst, Dark Star