An Officer and a Spy Quotes

“...it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre...”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“There is no such thing as a secret—not really, not in the modern world, not with photography and telegraphy and railways and newspaper presses.”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“There are occasions when losing is a victory, so long as there is a fight.”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“Bachelors of forty are society’s stray cats. We are taken in by households and fed and made a fuss of;”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“This sort of talk always bores me: old men complaining that the world is going to the dogs. It’s so banal.”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“I feel as if I have walked into a mirrored room and glimpsed myself from an unfamiliar angle for the first time. Is that really what I look like? Is that who I am?”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“Outwardly, I hope, I wear my usual mask of detachment, even irony, for there has never been a situation,however dire, even this one, that did not strike me as containing at least some element of the human comedy.”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“The old days of an inner circle of like-minded souls communicating with parchment and quill pens are gone. Sooner or later most things will be revealed.”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“My four golden principles are more important now than ever: take it one step at a time; approach the matter dispassionately; avoid a rush to judgement; confide in nobody until there is hard evidence.”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“I lay aside the papers. Really, it is beyond hypocrisy; it is beyond even lying: it has become a psychosis.”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“Isn’t an awareness of their transience what gives these moments their exquisite edge?”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“about”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“take it one step at a time; approach the matter dispassionately; avoid a rush to judgement; confide in nobody until there is hard evidence.”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“make”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“old men complaining that the world is going to the dogs.”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“When did the defendant first”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“It is my first lesson in the cabalistic power of “secret intelligence”: two words that can make otherwise sane men abandon their reason and cavort like idiots.”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“them,”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“feeling”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“Socially, he has the bore’s trick of seeking one’s opinion on something – in this case he asks my view of the impending state visit of the Russian tsar – and listening to it with barely disguised impatience, until he is at last able to interrupt and launch into his own prepared monologue.”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre;”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy