Novelists From England

"Leaving the shore I walk among the trees; a cloud passes, and the sweet short rain comes mingled with sunbeams and flower-scented air. The finches sing among the fresh green leaves of the beeches. Beautiful it is, in summer days, to see the wheat wave, and the long grass foam-flecked of flower yield and return to the wind. My soul of itself always desires; these are to it as fresh food. I have found in the hills another valley grooved in prehistoric times, where, climbing to the top of the hollow, I can see the sea. Down in the hollow I look up; the sky stretches over, the sun burns as it seems but just above the hill, and the wind sweeps onward. As the sky extends beyond the valley, so I know that there are ideas beyond the valley of my thought; I know that there is something infinitely higher than deity. The great sun burning in the sky, the sea, the firm earth, all the stars of night are feeble—all, all the cosmos is feeble; it is not strong enough to utter my prayer-desire. My soul cannot reach to its full desire of prayer. I need no earth, or sea, or sun to think my thought. If my thought-part—the psyche—were entirely separated from the body, and from the earth, I should of myself desire the same. In itself my soul desires; my existence, my soul-existence is in itself my prayer, and so long as it exists so long will it pray that I may have the fullest soul-life."

"The only person who saw the car go into the ravine that night was Berlatsky."

"Maria fetched the letters, half-running. She was the most willing girl they had ever had, and within three months she'd be speaking good English, and a month later she would leave, as they all did, because her mother was sick in Tijuana: in other words, someone—often a close neighbour—had offered her even more money, a colour TV set and the whole of every Friday off as well as Sunday."

"Charlie saw her eyes were wet and he didn't know what to say because he wasn't used to thinking about people the way they really were, especially women: he only saw them as people who were going to be dumb enough to buy his line of crap or who were going to slam the door in his face and leave him eating tacos-to-go that night instead of sitting down at a Macdonald's. The Judge had asked him if he had any friends and he couldn't think of any, and he'd never realised it before."

"He looked around at the peeling paint and the missing light-tubes and the juke-box with its 'Out of Order' notice stuck across the glass, and she knew what he was thinking: this was the kind of place that made you wonder how the hell it kept going, then a week later you come past and see it's shut down."

"For forty-three years Berlatsky had made a point of keeping out of trouble and now there was this."

"Berlatsky noted these things because all his life he had noted things, like a sparrow picks at crumbs. You could miss a lot of chances by not using your eyes."

"He felt her watching him, maybe wondering if he was some kind of nut. He'd been wondering about that himself, as a matter of fact, during the past hour, but very slowly he was beginning to think he might not be any kind of nut at all, and that would make a nice change."

"[W]hat use is an honest lawyer when what you need is a dishonest one?"

"You, a British non-com, one of those upper-crust limeys whose voices make them sound as if they're pederasts even when they're not, could never be suspect."

"'May guests be permitted to know what fresh disaster now postpones our detailed examination of your criminal past?' 'Certainly. The house is on fire.'"

"He has a one-hundred-and-ten percent British accent. Only other guy I ever met with an accent like it is an Armenian with a Lebanese passport who works for Unesco and was educated at the English High School in Istanbul before going on to the Sorbonne."

"It is absolutely essential that you rid yourself of this absurd idea that I am a criminal or that I have criminal instincts. I am a lawyer who respects the law. Illegality is for the immature and the foolish. The wise man has no need of it."

"The warning message arrived on Monday, the bomb itself on Wednesday. It became a busy week."

"In your profession you must have met lots of very rich self-made men, as rich as or even richer than Zander. They always tend to regard themselves as a little above the law, wouldn't you say?"

"They say that the Devil still quotes the scriptures"

"[Ambler's novels are] the well into which everybody had dipped"

"Nicki, my wife, was off in Romania somewhere on a three-week tour with the rest of the troupe. She is an exotic dancer, and if anyone wants to know how it was that a man my age, still vigorous but admittedly a bit the worse for wear, came to have a Greek woman twenty years his junior for a wife, they must ask her. [...] A man is entitled to seek consolation, and an attractive woman is entitled to look for protection. I always handled her business affairs or her, and when she was in a good mood she called me "papa." I may add that Nicki worked because she liked to work, not because I made her do so. I took no commission. She was completely free to come and go as she pleased, and with whom she pleased. I asked no questions. I have regretted our enforced separation very deeply. I went through her things to see if there was anything I could sell."

"It had been a most unpleasant day. [...] We had been questioned and cross-questioned. [...] The police couldn't have been worse. The questioner was a suspicious and bloody-minded Frenchman who made it clear from the start that he regarded us as undesirables. [...] My passport was received with a mocking smile. The bastard wouldn't take our word for anything. We had to show our money and count it out before his eyes. Then the amounts were written in our passports. We were warned against attempting to find work, unless it was in a ship leaving Djibouti, or to engage in the drug traffic. We were told, finally, that if either of us was still in the territory seven days hence, he had better be able to swim."

"Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through."

"By the failures of the world in which I move I have been accused in my time of possessing nearly all the anti-social qualities. It has been said that, both in my business and in my private lives, I have been consistently sly, treacherous, ruthless and rapacious, vindictive, devious, sadistic and generally vile. I could add to that list. But no one, no one, has yet suggested that I would like even condone a resort to violence by others, much less promote or organize the use of it myself."

"'Bitter?' He grinned. 'Why on earth should I feel bitter? We were barbarians. You will note that I say "we". I include myself. What would we in our ignorance have done with so much old bird-crap, so much phosphate. Nothing. Our exploitation by the Powers was the best thing that ever happened to us. Even the American bombing was good. Simple people enjoy loud bangs.'"

"Latimer turned to watch the subject of these reflections carefully, almost lovingly, adjusting the coffee percolator, and thought how difficult it was to dislike a man when he was making coffee for you."

"Drug addicts, you know, are always very eager to get other people to take drugs too."

"I think that, to begin with, he had intended to kill Dimitrios when he found him, but as he began to get short of money his hatred of Dimitrios became more reasonable."

"If I had not made the money, someone else would have done so. Not one of those unfortunate creatures would have been any better off and I should have lost money."

"Greta is really a splendid cook and there is nothing Swiss about my wines."

"The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet."

"Power is for the powerful. Let power fall into the hands of the weak and the rest is tyranny."

""Let us hope the bad times are ended for good," [said Mr. Tan.] "Good business for one is good business for all," said Girija. "Very true." Now, Mr. Tan decided, they were coming to the point. Reference to mutual advantage was the accepted preliminary to a squeeze."

"Hallett drew a deep breath. "Mr. Nilson," he said, "I wish you could tell me something. Why is it that when an apparently normal, intelligent, law-abiding citizen like you gets hold of a passport and a steamship ticket, he suddenly turns into a juvenile--" "Okay, Mr. Hallett," Greg broke in irritably. "You can't say anything I haven't already said to myself.""

"It came down to this: if I hadn't been arrested by the Turkish police, I would have been arrested by the Greek police. I had no choice but to do what this man Harper told me. He was entirely responsible for what happened to me."

"In my experience, most people are extraordinarily careless about the way they look after traveler's checks. Just because their counter-signature is required before a check can be cashed, they assume that only they can negotiate it. Yet anyone with eyes in his head can copy the original signature. [...] People who leave traveler's checks lying around deserve to lose them."

"It is hard for a woman not to like very much an attractive, rich and intelligent older man who adores her and yet who does not lose his good sense and dignity by insisting that she adore him in return."

"I think that if I were asked to single out one specific group of men, one type, one category, as being the most suspicious, unbelieving, unreasonable , petty, inhuman, sadistic, double-crossing set of bastards in any language, I would say without any hesitation: "the people who run counter-espionage departments." With them, it is no use having just one story; and especially not a true story; they automatically disbelieve that. What you must have is a series of stories, so that when they knock the first one down you can bring out the second, and then when they scrub that out, come up with a third. That way they think they are making progress and keep their hands off you, while you gradually find out the story they really want you to tell."

"Ever seen an old man just sitting in the sun, taking it easy? It doesn't have to mean he's senile. It may do, but very likely he can snap out of it and put his mind to work again if it gets really necessary. But mostly he finds it not worth the bother. Less trouble just to let things happen.'"

"Keeping to an unnecessary programme requires resolution."

"'In the end, defeat, and the cold, must come. First to the system, then the galaxy, then the universe, and the rest will be silence. Not to admit that is a foolish vanity.' She paused. 'Yet one grows flowers because they are lovely - not because one wishes them to live for ever.'"

"'Thank you, Hester,' Janet said, as she leaned back against the cushion placed behind her. Not that it was necessary to thank a robot, but she had a theory that if you did not practise politeness with robots you soon forgot it with other people."

"'Ingenious you certainly were - like monkeys. But you neglected your philosophers - to your own ruin. Each new discovery was a toy. You never considered its true worth. You just pushed it into your system - a system already suffering from hardening of the arteries. And you were a greedy people. You took each discovery as if it were a bright new garment, but when you put it on you wore it over your old, verminous rags. You had grave need of disinfectants.'"

"'In spite of what they say, two can't live as cheap as one. And wives hanker after certain standards, and ought to have them - within reason, of course.'"

"'Do you never work? Does nobody work?' I asked Clytassamine. 'Oh yes - if he wants to,' she said. 'But what about the unpleasant things - the things that must be done?' 'What things?' she asked, puzzled. 'Well, growing food, providing power, disposing of waste, all that kind of thing.' She looked surprised. 'Why, naturally, the machines do all that. You wouldn't expect men to do those things. Good heavens, what have we got brains for?" 'But who looks after the machines - keeps them in order?' 'Themselves, of course.'"

"Hobbies are convenient in the child, but irritant in the adult; which is why women are careful never to have them, but simply to be interested in this and that."

"'But how can you stand it - just going on and on?' It is not easy sometimes - and some of us do give up, but that is a crime, because there is always chance. And it's not quite so monotonous as you think. Each transfer makes a difference. You feel as if the world had become a different place then. The spirit rises in you like sap in spring. . . . And those glands you think so much of are not entirely without effect, because you are never quite the same person with quite the same tastes. Even in one body tastes can change quite a lot in one lifetime, and they inevitably differ slightly between bodies. But you are the same person, you have your memory, yet you are young again, you're hopeful, the world looks brighter, you think you'll be wiser this time. . . . And then you fall in love again, just as sweetly and foolishly as before. It's wonderful - like a re-birth. You can only know just how wonderful if you have been fifty and then become twenty.' 'I can guess,' I said."

"I had only my thoughts to occupy me, and they were not good company."

"And there was another thing, too. No matter what your business is, some gals ain't got no standard of affection except how much you neglect it for 'em. Seems they just got to back themselves against it—and they got it all nicely fixed so they win both ways. If you don't neglect it, you ain't lovin' them enough; if you do, they reckoned you were that kind of sap, anyway."

"I suppose one could scarcely have had innocence and experience. Being young is very exhausting and unsatisfactory, really—although it looks so nice."

"Other things than to fight, there is, even for dragons."

"“Lady,” he said, “some place there’s several freight cars of trouble marked 'Rush', and they’re all headed your way.”"

"I guess——" she said, wistfully—"I guess the only thing that's wrong with children is that they grow up to be people like you."