Alistair MacLean

"Foster always said that education was very important, but that it didn't really matter, because intelligence was more important than that, and that even intelligence didn't count for so much, that wisdom was far more important still. He said he had no idea in the world whether you had education or intelligence or wisdom and that it couldn't matter less, a blind man could see that you had a good heart, and the good heart was all that mattered in this world."

"The moment when a man hears that a girl's fiance has died only that day is the last moment that that man should ever begin to fall in love with her, but I'm afraid that's just how it was. The emotions are no respecters of the niceties, the proprieties and decencies of this life."

"Dr. MacDonald was a big heavily-built man in his late forties, with that well-leathered and spuriously tough look you quite often find among a certain section of the unemployed landed gentry who spend a great deal of time in the open air, much of it mounted on large horses in pursuit of small foxes."

"Every man is what environment and heredity make him."

"Nature wanted to show mankind, an irreverent, over-venturesome mankind, just how puny and pitifully helpless a thing mankind really is"

"To all things an end, to every night its dawn; even to the longest night when dawn never comes, there comes at last the dawn."

"Many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb he never looked back to that other side."

"She plunged down and kept on going down, driving down to the black floor of the Arctic, driven down by the madly spinning screws, the still thundering engines her own executioner."

"Major Rutledge of the Buffs, Eton and Sandhurst as to intonation, millimetrically tooth-brushed as to moustache, Savile Row as to the quite dazzling sartorial perfection of his khaki drill, was so magnificently out of place in the wild beauty of the rocky, tree-lined bluffs of that winding creek that his presence there seemed inevitable."

"There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die—that takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough. We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he, too, is brave and afraid like all the rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer."

"Cruelty and hate and intolerance are the monopoly of no particular race or creed or time. They have been with us since the world began and are still with us, in every country in the world."

"The intolerance of ignorance, not wanting to know – that is the last real frontier on earth."

"Women, I thought: if they fell over a cliff and thought there was company waiting at the bottom, they'd comb their hair on the way down."

"She had the best kind of courage, or maybe the worst kind, the kind that gets you into trouble."

"The first thing I noticed was the gun in his hands, and it wasn't the sort of gun a beginner carries around with him. A big dull black German Mauser 7.63. One of those economical guns; the bullet goes clear through three people at once."

"Big crime is big business, and big criminals are big businessmen, running their illegal activities with all the meticulous care and administrative precision of their more law-abiding colleagues."

"The Peacemaker Colt has now been in production, without change in design, for a century. ... It is the oldest hand-gun in the world, without question the most famous and, if efficiency in its designated task of maiming and killing be taken as criterion of its worth, then it is also probably the best hand-gun ever made."

"I should have listened to Hunslett. Again I should have listened to Hunslett. And again for Hunslett's sake. But I didn't know then that Hunslett was to have time for all the sleep in the world."

"It is no small thing, Major, to be lost in a blizzard in the night skies over war-torn Europe."

"He says if it's a choice between a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and internment in Switzerland he knows which side of the frontier he’s coming down on... After that we fly down the Swiss side of Lake Constance, turn east at Lindau, climb to eight thousand to clear the mountains and it’s only a hop, skip and jump to the Weissspitze." "I see," Smith said weakly. "But—but don't the Swiss object?" "Frequently, sir."

"With a face and a figure and an acting talent like that, she could have had Hollywood tramping a path of beaten gold to her doorstep."

"This won't look so good in my obituary," Schaffer said dolefully. There was a perceptible edge of strain under the lightly spoken words. ... "Gave his life for his country in a ladies' lavatory in Upper Bavaria."

"Kind of a treble agent, see?" Schaffer said in a patient explaining tone. "That's one better than double."

"They'll be coming for you, Mr. Jones. They'll be coming any moment now. I hate to say this, but I must. It is my duty to warn you what will happen to you, an enemy spy. You'll be tortured, Mr. Jones—not simply everyday tortures like pulling out your teeth and toe-nails, but unspeakable tortures I can't mention with Miss Ellison here—and then you'll finish in the gas chambers. If you're still alive. ... Oh God, when they strip you off and strap you down on the torture table—" Two seconds later Carnaby-Jones was over the sill and sliding down the nylon rope. His eyes were screwed tightly shut. Mary said, admiringly: "You really are the most fearful liar ever." "Schaffer keeps telling me the same thing," Smith admitted. "You can't all be wrong."

"The Major Smiths of this world don't drive over the edge of a cliff. Quotation from the future Mrs. Schaffer. The Major Smiths of this world don't fall off the roofs of cable cars. Quotation from the future. Mrs. Schaffer's future husband."

"Schaffer caught her by the shoulders, kissed her briefly and smiled at her. She looked at him in surprise. "Well, aren't you glad to see me?" Schaffer demanded. "I've had a terrible time up there. Good God, girl, I might have been killed." "Not as handsome as you were two hours ago." She smiled, gently touched his face where Carraciola's handiwork with the Schmeisser had left its bloody mark, and added over her shoulder as she climbed into the bus: "And that's as long as you've known me." "Two hours! I've aged twenty years tonight. And that, lady, is one helluva long courtship.""

"The motorcycle patrol's decision to elect for discretion in lieu of suicidal valour was as immediate as it was automatic."

""I am sorry, Miss Lemay. This must have been a great shock to you and it's all my fault. Will you come and have a drink with me? You look as if you need one." She dabbed her cheek some more and looked at me in a manner that demolished all thoughts of instant friendship. "I wouldn't even cross the road with you," she said tonelessly. The way she said it indicated that she would willingly have gone half-way across a busy street with me and then abandoned me there. If I had been a blind man."

"We know about this deliberate policy admittedly as effective as it is suicidal—of endless provocation, waiting for something, for somebody to break. But please, Major Sherman, please do not try to provoke too many people in Amsterdam. We have too many canals."

"Unspecified exhortation, when translated into practice, is always liable to a certain amount of executive misdirection."

"I was glad I was alive. Glad to be alive. It had been the sort of night that didn’t look like having any morning, but here I was and I was glad. The girls were glad. I was warm and dry and fed, the jonge Genever was happily chasing the red corpuscles in a game of merry-go-round, all the coloured threads were weaving themselves into a beautiful pattern and by day’s end it would be over. I had never felt so good before. I was never to feel so good again."

"They had come a long way, those gypsies encamped for their evening meal on the dusty greensward by the winding mountain road in Provence. ... A long journey, hot and stifling and endlessly, monotonously repetitive across the already baking plains of Central Europe or slow and difficult and exasperating and occasionally dangerous in the traversing of the great ranges of mountains that had lain in their way."

"When one searches any place, be it a gypsy caravan or a baronial mansion, methodically and exhaustively, one has to wreck it completely in the process."

"A terrified rat will swear to anything."

"They have every good reason to fear those from the outside world. We, ironically known as the civilizados—in practically everything that matters they're a damned sight more civilised than we are—bring them so-called progress, which harms them, so-called change, which harms them, so-called civilisation, which harms them even more, and disease, which kills them."