Child 44 Quotes

“There's nothing more stubborn than a fact. That is why you hate them so much. They offend you.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“To stand up for someone was to stitch your fate into the lining of theirs.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“Trust but check. Check on those we trust.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“—Isn’t this how it starts? You have a cause you believe in, a cause worth dying for. Soon, it’s a cause worth killing for. Soon, it’s a cause worth killing innocent people for.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“The price of this story was the audience's innocence.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“His hate wasn't professional; it was an obsession, a fixation, as if unrequited love had grown awful, twisted into something ugly.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“Leo, I have another secret. I've fallen in love with you.”

"I've always loved you.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“If he wanted to hear about love, the first verse was his to sing.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“Trust but check”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“sentimentality could blind a man to the truth. Those who appear the most trustworthy deserve the most suspicion.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“The survival of their political system justified anything. The promise of a golden age where none of this brutality would exist, where everything would be in plenty and poverty would be a memory, justified anything.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“We should measure a man by what they’re prepared to do themselves. Not by what they’re prepared to have others do for them.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“The duty of an investigator was to scratch away at innocence until guilt was uncovered. If no guilt was uncovered then they hadn’t scratched deep enough.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“....a man both handsome and repulsive in equal measure-as if his good looks were plastered over a rotten centre, a hero's face with a henchman's heart.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“Was the difference merely that Vasili was senselessly cruel while he’d been idealistically cruel? One was an empty, indifferent cruelty while the other was a principled, pretentious cruelty which thought of itself as reasonable and necessary.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“What is your name?”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“Precautionary measure. With those words any deaths could be justified. Better to destroy your own people than there be a chance a German soldier might find a loaf of bread.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“For decades no one had taken action according to what they believed was right or wrong but by what they thought would please their Leader. People”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“By his count there were forty-three in total. Nesterov had reached over, taken another pin from the box, and stuck it into the center of Moscow, making Arkady child 44.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“There was no chance you could be found innocent inside these walls. It was an assembly line of guilt.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“Leo’s very existence had been a kind of perpetual punishment for Vasili. So, then, why did he miss him?”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“ruthlessness. Leo was trapped. He couldn’t claim the”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“Janusz Bardach’s memoir, Man Is Wolf to Man (co-written by Kathleen Gleeson, Scribner, 2003), offers a powerful portrait of trying to survive in the Gulags of Stalinist Russia. On that subject both Anne Applebaum’s Gulag (Penguin, 2004) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,’s The Gulag Archipelago (Harvil, 2003) have been essential reading. For general historical background I’ve found Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow (Pimlico, 2002), Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin (Phoenix, 2004), and Shelia Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism (Oxford University Press, 1999) extremely useful. Regarding Russian police procedure, Anthony Olcott’s Russian Pulp (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001) went into detail not only about the justice system itself but also literary representations of that system. Boris Levytsky’s The Uses of Terror (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan Inc., 1972) was invaluable when it came to understanding, or at least trying to, the machinations of the MGB. Finally, Robert Cullen’s The Killer Department (Orion, 1993) provided a clear account of the real-life navigation into the crimes of Andrei Chikatilo.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44

“Leo had no idea what the real crime statistics were. He had no desire to find out since those who knew were probably liquidated on a regular basis.”
― Tom Rob Smith, Child 44