Independence Square Quotes

“Did they look enough like each other to fool a passport check? Who knew? Arkady felt he looked nothing like his own passport picture, so perhaps he would look more like someone else’s.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Independence Square

“But that’s what I’ve learned from war zones. Sleep when you can.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Independence Square

“That’s what you need in life,” he had told Arkady. “The will to do what others won’t, the fortitude to rinse yourself in blood rather than wash it off.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Independence Square

“No one was better than a Russian at having a superiority complex and an inferiority complex at the same time.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Independence Square

“Arkady regarded pukh in the same way he regarded Moscow’s traffic: as an annoyance so commonplace that acceptance was the path of least resistance.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Independence Square

“There are no grand plans, no master strategies, just the lust for power, the insane addictive desire to accumulate more and more because too much is never enough.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Independence Square: Arkady Renko in Ukraine

“It was Stalin’s Great Terror updated for modern times, with disinformation, legal machinations, indiscriminate violence. Bloodshed was a way of proving loyalty. One was either with or against. And the penalties for resistance were changing all the time, from imprisonment to death, ordered or merely allowed to happen. It amounted to the same thing.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Independence Square: Arkady Renko in Ukraine

“Outer conformity masks inner rebellion. That’s you.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Independence Square: Arkady Renko in Ukraine

“That left denial. If he pretended that he didn’t have it, he could ignore the ways it was affecting his life. Denial sounded good.”
― Martin Cruz Smith, Independence Square: Arkady Renko in Ukraine