Night Soldiers Quotes

“Live today, for tomorrow we die.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“When you are done living for yourself, only then do you learn that living for others is the privilege,’ Renata”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“This year, of course, being 1936, there would be no figs.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“The sun?" Goldman said in an unguarded moment. "I hear they've shot it.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“We are afflicted with a darkness of the soul and fall in love with our pain.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“It made her—a bizarre trick—long for a past that was still in the future.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“A certain type—he knew them all too well from years of experience as a detective, he knew how they acted, how they spoke, how their minds worked. These were people who would do anything to win at what they saw as the game of life, who had no allegiance to anyone or anything beyond themselves, who were gifted liars, who could scheme their way into almost anyone’s confidence, then betray them without hesitation.”
― Alan Furst, A Hero of France

“There is an enormous body of literature, fiction and nonfiction, written about the period 1933–1945, so Alan Furst’s recommendations for reading in that era are very specific. He often uses characters who are idealistic intellectuals, particularly French and Russian, who become disillusioned with the Soviet Union but still find themselves caught up in the political warfare of the period. “Among the historical figures who wrote about that time,” Furst says, “Arthur Koestler may well be ‘first among equals.’ ” Furst suggests Koestler’s Darkness at Noon as a classic story of the European intellectual at midcentury.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“ПOΛHAЯПYOTOTA—”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“But nothing here was what it seemed. Even the grey stone of the buildings hid within itself a score of secret tints, to be revealed only by one momentary strand of light. At first, the tide of secrecy that rippled through the streets had made him tense and watchful, but in time he realised that in a city of clandestine passions, everyone was a spy.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“If you are victorious, he has said to us, you will be sitting on a pile of ruins. But we have always lived in slums and holes in the wall...and it is we who built the palaces and the cities, and we are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history. But we carry a new world in our hearts.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“wainscoting”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Without the daily texture of existence to occupy it, he learned, the human soul wavers, wanders, begins to feed upon itself, and, in time, disintegrates.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“In return for their faithful service, they would receive Red Army food rations, which amounted to a generous ladle, twice daily, from a cauldron into which all appropriated food was thrown. The stew boiled twenty-four hours a day, a fatty broth of onions, roosters, rabbits, dead horse, turnips - whatever they happened on in the course of their collecting forays - the Red Army essentially lived off the countryside.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“crossed borders like the wind. Yet it had happened, and Khristo finally understood how it had happened. Moving across the countryside made one prey, over time, to a series of small mishaps, none of them serious in and of itself, but cumulative over time. A few hours of sleep when one could manage it, a meal now and then, the insidious chill of the early spring, the constant forcing of the mind into a state of vigilance when all one craved was numbness, when not to think about anything seemed the most exquisite luxury the world had to offer.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“[on chess]

He had learned the moves, back in Vidin, from Levitzky the tailor, who called it “the Russian game.” Thus, the old man pointed out, the weak were sacrificed. The castles, fortresses, were obvious and basic; the bishops moved obliquely; the knights—an officer class—sought power in devious ways; the queen, second-in-command, was pure aggression; and the king, heart of it all, a helpless target, dependent totally on his forces for survival.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Russia might be characterized as a wicked beast of a nation, but it was a very large beast, and sometimes it thrashed its tail.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“I was as you are now. A peasant. I sought the world. Because the alternative was to spend the rest of my life looking up a plowhorse's backside.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“European starvation was rather more cunning and wore a series of clever masks: death came by drink, by tuberculosis, by the knife, by despair in all its manifestations.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Communards died here, in 1871. They fought all night among the gravestones, then surrendered at dawn. The soldiers put them against this wall, shot them, and buried them in a common grave.” “Are you a communist, Ilya? In your heart?” “Oh yes. Aren’t you?” “No. I just want to live my life, to be left alone.” There was a moment’s silence, then Ilya said, “Now, a matter of some delicacy.” They turned”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“It was a great softening, night and day it continued, a water funeral for the dying winter.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Spying came to him as making love comes to other men. It is his belief, in fact, that his father may have had relations with the Okhrana, the czar’s intelligence service, though his murder by the Turks was haphazard—simply one act in a village slaughter. But Avram knew them, whether they were Turkish Aghas or British officers, he always understood how they worked, where their vulnerabilities lay.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers