Codename Villanelle Quotes

“Without predators, people who can think the unthinkable, and act without fear or hesitation, the world stands still. You are an evolutionary necessity.”
― Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle

“In silence lies safety.”
― Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle

“Oxana had never felt the slightest need to be liked, but it gave her profound satisfaction to be desired.”
― Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle

“Someone who could get up in the morning, make coffee, choose what to wear, and then go out and cold-bloodedly put a total stranger to death. Did you have to be some kind of anomalous, psychopathic freak to do that? Did you have to be born that way? Or could any woman, correctly programmed, be turned into a professional executioner?”
― Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle

“With her make-up-free complexion and nondescript brown hair gathered in a scrappy up-do, she looks like someone for whom there are more important things than being thought pretty. She might be an academic, or an assistant in the better sort of a bookshop. But there's something about her—a stillness, a fixity of gaze—that tells another story.”
― Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle

“For Villanelle, language is fluid. Most of the time she thinks in French, but every so often she awakes and knows that she’s been dreaming in Russian. At times, close to sleep, the blood roars in her ears, an unstoppable tide shot through with polyglot screams. On such occasions, alone in the Paris apartment, she anaesthetises herself with hours of web-surfing, usually in English. And now, she notes, she is mentally playing out scenarios in Sicilian-inflected Italian. She hasn’t sought out the language, but her head echoes with it. Is there any part of her that is still Oxana Vorontsova? Does she still exist, that little girl who lay night after night in urine-sodden sheets at the orphanage, planning her revenge? Or was there only ever Villanelle, evolution’s chosen instrument?”
― Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle

“Dragon-fruit Martini in hand, Simon makes his way towards one of the Star Bar’s few unoccupied seats, which appears to be upholstered in zebra-skin. “Boss Ass Bitch” by Nicki Minaj is pumping from concealed speakers,”
― Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle

“I really really don't want to die here, among these criminally ugly furnishings.”
― Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle

“Tenderness, sympathy, distress, guilt, shock, sadness… Villanelle has never actually experienced any such emotions, but she can simulate them all.”
― Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle

“shufti.”
― Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle

“Sex, for her, offers only fleeting physical satisfaction. What she finds much more exciting is to look into another person’s eyes and to know, like a cobra swaying in front of its hypnotised prey, that she is in absolute control. But that game gets boring, too. People capitulate so easily.”
― Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle

“She’s taken to pacing mutely around the flat in the evenings, vodka tonic in hand, like an alcoholic ghost.”
― Luke Jennings, Codename Villanelle