Alan Furst QUOTES

1 " For Mercier, it was the ceremony of the mass that eased his soul: the sweetish smoke trailing from the censer, the ringing of the bell, the Latin incantations of the priest. In Warsaw, he attended early mass, at a small church near the apartment, once or twice a month, confessing to his vocational sins – duplicity, for example – in the oblique forms provided by Catholic protocol. He’d grown up an untroubled believer, but the war had put an end to that. What God could permit such misery and slaughter? But, in time, he had found consolation in a God beyond understanding and prayed for those he’d lost, for those he loved, and for an end to evil in the world.” ― Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw "

― Alan Furst , The Spies of Warsaw (Night Soldiers, #10)

2 " Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen. "

― Alan Furst , Mission to Paris (Night Soldiers, #12)

3 " A moment comes, and if you wish to look at yourself as human, you must take some kind of action. Otherwise, you can read the newspapers and congratulate yourself on your good fortune. "

― Alan Furst , Dark Star (Night Soldiers, #2)

4 " Whether they loved each other or not, they were lovers. And he was damned if he'd see her sucked into this brutal business. "

― Alan Furst , Dark Star (Night Soldiers, #2)

5 " But the world doesn't run on logic, it runs on the seven deadly sins and the weather. - Alan Furst; Red Gold "

― Alan Furst

6 " And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini's armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn't sure what came next. So, don't trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow. "

― Alan Furst , Spies of the Balkans (Night Soldiers, #11)

7 " Having lived in a mythical country, a place neither here nor there, these intellectuals from Vilna and Gomel helped create another and called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Such a name! It was hardly a union. The Soviets - workers’ councils - ruled it for about six weeks; socialism impoverished everybody, and only machine guns kept the republics from turning into nations. But to Szarza and the rest it didn’t matter. He’d put his life on the line, preferring simply to die at the wrong end of a gun rather than the wrong end of a club, and for twelve years - until 1929, when Stalin finally took over - he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic, intellectual Jews actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer. "

― Alan Furst , Dark Star (Night Soldiers, #2)

8 " 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 (Night Soldiers, #1)

9 " There were moments when Szara suspected that many idealists drawn to Communism were, at heart, people with an appetite for clandestine life. "

― Alan Furst , Dark Star (Night Soldiers, #2)

10 " 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 (Night Soldiers, #1)

11 " At least, he thought, looking down at his feet, his socks were still in decent shape. It was the socks that went first. A whore he knew said that she only took customers whose socks were in good condition. One of Casson's fellow lodgers showed him how he used a pen to color in the skin that showed white in the holes. "

― Alan Furst

12 " This year, of course, being 1936, there would be no figs. "

― Alan Furst , Night Soldiers (Night Soldiers, #1)

13 " He was, in military life, a sergeant. Casson had already guessed that by the time he got around to mentioning it. A sergeant: good at getting things done. By the book so long as it worked. By being crooked if that's what it took. "

― Alan Furst , Red Gold (Night Soldiers, #5)

14 " Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying "

― Alan Furst , The Spies of Warsaw (Night Soldiers, #10)

15 " One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be. "

― Alan Furst , The World at Night (Night Soldiers, #4)

16 " There's a French saying, ‘Où le Dieu a vous semé, il faut savoir fleurir.’ Let's see, ‘Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower'... "

― Alan Furst , The Spies of Warsaw (Night Soldiers, #10)

17 " Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus: the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said "

― Alan Furst , Dark Star (Night Soldiers, #2)

18 " Live today, for tomorrow we die. "

― Alan Furst , Night Soldiers (Night Soldiers, #1)

19 " This land, like so much of the French countryside, was a painting, but Mercier felt his heart touched with melancholy and realized, not for the first time, that beautiful places were hard on lonely people. "

― Alan Furst , The Spies of Warsaw (Night Soldiers, #10)

20 " 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 (Night Soldiers, #1)

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