The Black Widow Quotes

“Like many Vatican pronouncements, the official version of events would bear little resemblance to the truth.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“Gabriel was remarried, a father, and the chief of the Office. The restorer was restored.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“Barak, the Hebrew word for lightning,”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“Among security professionals, Molenbeek was known as the jihadi capital of Europe.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“Gabriel wondered how the American president would feel if ISIS were two hours from Indiana.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“Muslims, whom he regarded as a people “alien to God.” The Christian soldiers, who would one day be known as Crusaders, breached the city’s defenses on the night of July 13, 1099, and slaughtered its inhabitants, including three thousand men, women, and children who had taken shelter inside the great al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. It was Saladin, the son of a Kurdish soldier of fortune from Tikrit, who would return the favor. After humiliating the thirst-crazed Crusader force at the Battle of Hattin near Tiberias—Saladin personally sliced off the arm of Raynald of Châtillon—the Muslims reclaimed Jerusalem after a negotiated surrender. Saladin tore down the large cross that had been erected atop the Dome of the Rock, scrubbed its courts with Damascene rosewater to remove the last foul traces of the infidel, and sold thousands of Christians into slavery or the harem. Jerusalem would remain under Islamic control until 1917, when the British seized it from the Ottoman Turks. And when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1924, so, too, did the last Muslim caliphate. But now ISIS had declared a new caliphate. At present, it included only portions of western Iraq and eastern Syria, with Raqqa as its capital. Saladin, the new Saladin, was ISIS’s chief of external operations—or so believed Fareed Barakat and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department. Unfortunately, the GID knew almost nothing else about Saladin, including his real name. “Is he Iraqi?” “He might be. Or he might be a Tunisian or a Saudi or an Egyptian or an Englishman or one of the other lunatics who’ve rushed to Syria to live in this new Islamic paradise of theirs.” “Surely, the GID doesn’t believe that.” “We don’t,” Fareed conceded. “We think he’s probably a former Iraqi military officer. Who knows? Maybe he’s from Tikrit, just like Saladin.” “And Saddam.” “Ah, yes, let’s not forget Saddam.” Fareed exhaled a lungful of smoke toward the high ceiling of his office. “We had our problems with Saddam, but we warned the Americans they would rue the day they toppled him. They didn’t listen, of course. Nor did they listen when we asked them to do something about Syria. Not our problem, they said. We’re putting the Middle East in our rearview mirror. No more American wars in Muslim lands. And now look at the situation. A quarter of a million dead, hundreds of thousands more streaming into Europe, Russia and Iran working together to dominate the Middle East.” He shook his head slowly. “Have I left anything out?” “You forgot Saladin,” said Gabriel. “What do you want to do about him?” “I suppose we could do nothing and hope he goes away.” “Hope is how we ended up with him in the first place,” said Fareed. “Hope and hubris.” “So let’s put him out of business, sooner rather than later.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“proscribed”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“Marriott.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“His sense of humor was self-deprecating. “When they make the movie about Gabriel,” he said with his inscrutable smile, “please ask them to make me taller.” General Doron Almog and his beautiful wife, Didi, always open their home to us when we come to Israel and, like Chiara and Gilah Shamron, they prepare far more food than we can possibly eat. I did not know Doron when I created Gabriel’s physical appearance, but surely he was the mold upon which my character was based. One never quite knows who might show up at Doron’s dinner table. Late”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“I am a soldier of Allah, but a great admirer of Winston Churchill. And it was Churchill who said that in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“Langley estimates that because of global warming, the south of England will one day be among the world’s largest producers of premium wine.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“— Faremos o nosso melhor — disse antes de se dirigir rapidamente para Paris. — É a nossa obrigação. As vítimas tinham 12 anos de idade, dois rapazes e uma rapariga, todos judeus, embora os meios de comunicação franceses não tenham mencionado a religião nos primeiros relatos. Também não se preocuparam em referir que os seis atacantes eram muçulmanos, apenas que eram jovens e que viviam nos subúrbios, num banlieue a leste do centro da cidade. A descrição do ataque foi vaga ao ponto de apresentar imprecisões. De acordo com uma estação de rádio francesa, tinha ocorrido algum tipo de desentendimento no exterior de uma pastelaria. Três pessoas tinham”
― Daniel Silva, A Viúva Negra

“a visiting congressman from Ohio. Inspired by the”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“Safia Bourihane sat alone, her thumb on her detonator, her eyes on her watch. Carter raised the phone to his ear and again ordered Mikhail to leave the restaurant at once. Gabriel still couldn’t”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“In Washington, for example.” Rousseau set off along the embankment. “The invasion of Iraq turned the region into a cauldron. And when the new American president decided the time had come to withdraw, the cauldron boiled over. And then there was this folly we called the Arab Spring. Mubarak must go! Gaddafi must go! Assad must go!” He shook his head slowly. “It was madness, absolute madness. And now we are left with this. ISIS controls a swath of territory the size of the United Kingdom, right on the doorstep of Europe. Even Bin Laden would have never dared to dream of such a thing. And what does the American president tell us? ISIS is not Islamic. ISIS is the jayvee team.” He frowned. “What does this mean? Jayvee?” “I think it has something to do with basketball.” “And what does basketball have to do with a subject as serious as the rise of the caliphate?” Gabriel only smiled. “Does he truly believe this drivel, or is it an ignorantia affectata?” “A willful ignorance?” “Yes.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.” And it is rapidly taking on many functions of a modern state, issuing its citizenry everything from driver’s permits to fishing licenses.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“There is no doubt that the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 created the seedbed from which ISIS sprang. And there is also no doubt that the failure to leave a residual American force in Iraq in 2011, combined with the outbreak of civil war in Syria, allowed the group to flourish and spread on two sides of an increasingly meaningless border. To dismiss the group as “un-Islamic” or “not a state” is wishful thinking and, ultimately, counterproductive and dangerous.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“suicide vest.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“peered out at its subjects like a telescreen keeping watch over Winston Smith in his flat at the Victory Mansions.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“His civilization had flourished for thousands of years in the harsh and unforgiving land of Mesopotamia before anyone had ever heard of a place called America. And it would survive long after the great American experiment receded into history. Of this, Saladin was certain. All great empires eventually collapsed. Only Islam was forever. The”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“The Saudis are more afraid of Iran than they are of ISIS. Iran is Shiite. And ISIS, for all its evil, is Sunni.” “And”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“The Saudis are more afraid of Iran than they are of ISIS. Iran is Shiite. And ISIS, for all its evil, is Sunni.” “And from the Saudi perspective,” continued Natalie, “a Sunni caliphate is far preferable to a Shiite Crescent that stretches from Iran to Lebanon.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“Such was life in the Islamic caliphate, bombs falling upon severed heads, in a park where children once played. It”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“French and Swiss villages existed side by side along a largely invisible border, but Switzerland did not wish to wipe France from the map. Nor did the Swiss beseech their sons to shed the blood of French infidels. Gradually,”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“An American air strike ended Zarqawi’s life in June 2006, and by the end of the decade al-Qaeda in Iraq had been decimated. But in 2011 two events conspired to revive its fortunes: the outbreak of civil war in Syria and the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq. Now known as ISIS, the group rose from the ashes and rushed into the power vacuum along the Syria–Iraq border.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“noteworthy”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“ISIS doesn’t crucify only because it is cruel. It crucifies because, according to the Koran, crucifixion is one of the proscribed punishments for the enemies of Islam. It crucifies because it must. We civilized Westerners find this almost impossible to comprehend.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“You exist in this place, you sleep peacefully in this land tonight, because of people like me.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“The invasion of Iraq turned the region into a cauldron. And when the new American president decided the time had come to withdraw, the cauldron boiled over. And then there was this folly we called the Arab Spring. Mubarak must go! Gaddafi must go! Assad must go!” He shook his head slowly. “It was madness, absolute madness. And now we are left with this. ISIS controls a swath of territory the size of the United Kingdom, right on the doorstep of Europe. Even Bin Laden would have never dared to dream of such a thing. And what does the American president tell us? ISIS is not Islamic. ISIS is the jayvee team.”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow

“For better or worse, security was one of the few growth industries in France. Just”
― Daniel Silva, The Black Widow