Black Out Quotes

“Really, when you get to know him Ike’s OK. I mean not grouchy or anything and not too bright. I mean OK for a general – you wouldn’t want him to be President or anything like that.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“D’ye know the Black Swan, East India Dock Road?’ Troy shook his head. ‘Bloke found dead in his room. Blood all over the place. Door locked from the inside. A real Sherlock Holmes-er.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“Heathrow was referred to as an air port. Troy presumed that this fiction was in some way meant to distinguish it from such places as Croydon which had always been called an aerodrome or Brize Norton which remained an air field. It was a linguistic elevation, a sleight of tongue. What it amounted to on the physical plane was a shanty town of shacks and bulldozers, mountains of frozen mud, on the very fringe of London — so far out as to seem like another country. In this weather, Troy thought, it might as well be the North Pole.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“The mess was three-quarters empty, but the dozen or more men at the bar seemed hell bent on making up for it by celebrating Christmas as loudly and as drunkenly as they could. It seemed a bleak variety of joy.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“the silent tutting infuriated him as symptomatic of a generation. The assumed air of gravity and the fraudulent pretence of judgement in situations that required only answer or action struck him as the manner in which old men concealed their hollowness.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“He stared at those decent, well-meaning faces with their decent, well-meaning expressions, lost now in the chaos which their pitifully decent, well-meaning society struggled to keep at bay.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“Troy interjected that murder was unlikely to be one of the many ways in which Wells had offended society.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“Troy had always thought of pipes as a way of passing off vacuity as thought, the hollow man’s way of seeming less than hollow.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“He had never heard of a composer called Tippett but he knew it meant a tuneless evening of scraping catgut.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“I’m terribly sorry, but I really don’t see how I can help you.’ It was the sort of line that if uttered in a play by J. B. Priestley would lead to the host getting up to heave on the bell-pull prior to the butler showing the detective his way out and his place in society.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“A tailored and pleated version of men’s striped trousers flapped around her long legs and pinched in tightly at her waist – a black silk shirt, complete with silver cufflinks, rippled from broad shoulders across a small bosom. A single strand of pearls at the the throat. This was hardly a gesture to femininity, for the whole appearance contrived femininity in irony.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“Whatever she may think now, it’s still second nature to her to take a little deference from the deferential classes.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“They’re all in the Toff’s Rifles or the Mummersetshire Yeomanry.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“The Americans will see you. God knows why, but they will.’ ‘You have a way of making it sound as though they’re above the law,’ said Troy. ‘What you don’t grasp, Troy, is that they run things now.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“Albany was, as Onions would have said, the ‘swankiest’ address a single man about town could have. A beautiful, exclusive apartment building on the north side of Piccadilly. It was an address that would have suited such as Lord Peter Wimsey or Albert Campion,”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“I wouldn’t want to be treading too close behind you with the Pyms and the Fermanaghs in this Lobster Quadrille. You never know, I might wear me brown boots with me blue suit, and that would never do.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“In the cafés of Leman Street the only way to get tea without sugar was to put your hand across the cup before they could spoon it in. Such habits were almost solely responsible for British teeth.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“If Poland was not so much a country, more a state of mind, then Russia was less a country, less a state of mind than an hysterical heart.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“When you see as many dead as I do they begin to blur into one colossal corpse. The world-carcass.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“He looked back at Troy – a bold, challenging eye-to-eye stare that Troy had often wished he possessed himself. If he could look like that he’d be the hard man of the Yard in no time.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“The same picket of urban cowboys met Troy at the lost junction of Cardigan Street and Waterloo Place. The same child’s stare, suspicious of any adult, met his greeting to the boys.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“Bonham walked down the line with a stack of sixpences and passed them out like a priest of mammon at unholy communion. Hands flashed like the tongues of lizards, deftly trousering the loot.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“People with views of the Thames seemed always to be looking out, expecting more from the promise than the view would ever deliver.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“How best to state his case. In a game of stakes and odds, Onions held a full corpse to his one arm – he didn’t even have a pair.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“Troy glanced at the boys, wondering how much they heard and how much they understood. Eight cherubic faces, and sixteen hard, ruthless eyes looked back at him.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“as to make elder brothers into know-alls.”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“Troy wrapped his hand around the gun and asked himself why God had so ordered the world as”
― John Lawton, Black Out

“Troy wrapped his hand around the gun and asked himself why God had so ordered the world as to make elder brothers into know-alls.”
― John Lawton, Black Out