From Russia with Love Quotes

“But I am greedy for life. I do too much of everything all the time. Suddenly one day my heart will fail. The Iron Crab will get me as it got my father. But I am not afraid of The Crab. At least I shall have died from an honourable disease. Perhaps they will put on my tombstone. 'This Man Died from Living Too Much'.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“Hope makes a good breakfast. Eat plenty of it.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“For her, sex was nothing more than an itch. And this phsychological and physiological neutrality of hers at once relieved her of so many human emotions and sentiments and desires. Sexual neutrality was the essence of coldness in an individual. It was a great and wonderful thing to be born with.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“Just as, at least in one religion, accidia is the first of the cardinal sins, so bordom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“Danger, like a third man, was standing in the room.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“Once a King, always a King. But once a Knight is enough!”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love

“The great trains are going out all over Europe, one by one, but still, three times a week, the Orient Express thunders superbly over the 1,400 miles of glittering steel track between Istanbul and Paris.

Under the arc-lights, the long-chassied German locomotive panted quietly with the labored breath of a dragon dying of asthma. Each heavy breath seemed certain to be the last. Then came another.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“It is not just a question of blowing up a building or shooting a prime minister. Such bourgeois horseplay is not contemplated. Our operation must be delicate, refined and aimed at the heart of the Intelligence apparat of the West.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“Bond mistrusted anyone who tied his tie with a Windsor knot. It showed too much vanity.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love

“It was tied with a Windsor knot. Bond mistrusted anyone who tied his tie with a Windsor knot. It showed too much vanity. It was often the mark of a cad. Bond decided to forget his prejudice.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love

“From the first, Istanbul had given him the impression of a town where, with the night, horror creeps out of the stones. It seemed to him a town the centuries had so drenched in blood and violence that, when daylight went out, the ghosts of its dead were its only population.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“In his particular line of business, peace had reigned for nearly a year. And peace was killing him.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“Perhaps, after all, the right man was better than the right machine.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“Clusters of bats hung like bunches of withered grapes from the roof and when, from time to time, either Kerim's head or Bond's brushed against them, they exploded twittering into the darkness.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“It should have been the Arabian Nights, but to Bond, seeing it first above the tops of trams and above the great scars of modern advertising along the river frontage, it seemed a once beautiful theatre-set that modern Turkey had thrown aside in favour of the steel and concrete flat-iron of the Istanbul-Hilton Hotel, blankly glittering behind him on the heights of Pera.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“Follow your fate, and be satisfied with it, and be glad not to be a second-hand motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in gin and nicotine, or a cripple - or dead.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“For, or so they whispered, she would take the camp-stool and draw it up close below the face of the man or woman that hung down over the edge of the interrogation table. Then she would squat down on the stool and and look into the face and quietly say 'No. 1' or 'No. 10' or 'No. 25' and the inquisitors would know what she meant and they would begin. And she would watch the eyes in the face a few inches away from hers and breathe in the screams as if they were perfume.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle of the ground floor and sometimes dug down into its foundations. To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane room only when the situation was beyond his control and no other possible action could be taken. Now he retired to this citadel, closed his mind to the hell of noise and violent movement, and focused on a single stitch in the back of the seat in front of him, waiting with slackened nerves for whatever fate had decided for B. E. A. Flight No. 130.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“standing back a few yards from a dusty road, was almost identical. But on this side the four windows were barred, and the central door was of oak. The villa had two medium-sized bedrooms on the upper floor and on the ground floor a sitting-room and a kitchen, part of which was walled off into a lavatory. There was no bathroom. The drowsy luxurious silence of early afternoon was broken by the sound of a car coming down the road. It stopped in front of the villa. There was the tinny clang of a car door being slammed and the car drove on. The door bell rang twice. The naked man beside the swimming pool did not move, but, at the noise of the bell and of the departing car, his eyes had for an instant opened very wide. It was as if the eyelids had pricked”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love

“Breakfast was Bond’s favourite meal of the day. When he was stationed in London it was always the same. It consisted of very strong coffee, from De Bry in New Oxford Street, brewed in an American Chemex, of which he drank two large cups, black and without sugar. The single egg, in the dark blue egg-cup with a gold ring round the top, was boiled for three and a third minutes. It was a very fresh, speckled brown egg from French Marans hens owned by some friend of May in the country. (Bond disliked white eggs and, faddish as he was in many small things, it amused him to maintain that there was such a thing as the perfect boiled egg.) Then there were two thick slices of wholewheat toast, a large pat of deep yellow Jersey butter and three squat glass jars containing Tiptree ‘Little Scarlet’ strawberry jam; Cooper’s Vintage Oxford marmalade and Norwegian Heather Honey from Fortnum’s. The coffee pot and the silver on the tray were Queen Anne, and the china was Minton, of the same dark blue and gold and white as the egg-cup.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love

“The double 0 numerals signify an agent who has killed and who is privileged to kill on active service.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love

“Bond sat down and looked across into the tranquil, lined sailor’s face that he loved, honoured and obeyed.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love

“Even the highest tree has an axe waiting at its foot.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love

“And what an honour to have been chosen. How silly to have been so frightened! Naturally the great leaders of the State would not allow harm to come to an innocent citizen who worked hard and had no black marks on her zapiska. Suddenly she felt immensely grateful to the father-figure that was the State, and proud that she would now have a chance to repay some of her debt. Even the Klebb woman wasn’t really so bad after all.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love

“This girl will only do these things on one condition.’ M.’s eyes narrowed until they were fierce, significant slits. ‘That you go out to Istanbul and bring her and the machine back to England.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love

“This is a billiard table. An easy, flat, green billiard table. And you have hit your white ball, and it is travelling easily and quietly towards the red. The pocket is alongside. Fatally, inevitably, you are going to hit the red and the red is going into that pocket. It is the law of the billiard table, the law of the billiard room. But, outside the orbit of these things, a jet pilot has fainted, and his plane is diving straight at that billiard room, or a gas main is about to explode, or lighting is about to strike. And the building collapses on top of you and on top of the billiard table Then what has happed to that white ball that could not miss the red ball, and to the red ball that could not miss the pocket? The white ball could not miss cording to the laws of the billiard table. But the laws of the billiard table are not the only laws, and the law governing the progress of this train, and of you to your destination are also not the only laws in this particular game.”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love

“Then the way was clear and the old European section of Istanbul glittered at the end of the broad half-mile of bridge with the slim minarets lancing up into the sky and the domes of the mosques, crouching at their feet, looking like big firm breasts. It should have been the Arabian Nights, but to Bond, seeing”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love

“He hated Virginia tobacco,”
― Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love