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March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1) QUOTES

March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1) QUOTES

1 " But nothing surprises me now. I’ve grown used to living in a world that is out of joint, as if it has been struck by an enormous earthquake so that the roads are no longer flat, nor the building straight. "

― Philip Kerr , March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1)

2 " I made an appointment to see him and then ordered another beer. While I was drinking it I did some doodling on a piece of paper, the algebraic kind that you hope will help you think more clearly. When I finished doing that, I was more confused than ever. Algebra was never my strong subject. "

― Philip Kerr , March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1)

3 " The concierge was a snapper who was over the hill and down a disused mine-shaft. Her hair was every bit as natural as a parade goose-stepping down the Wilhelmstrasse, and she'd evidently been wearing a boxing-glove when she's applied the crimson lipstick to her paperclip of a mouth. "

― Philip Kerr , March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1)

4 " When you get a cat to catch the mice in your kitchen, you can't expect it to ignore the rats in the cellar. "

― Philip Kerr , March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1)

5 " Looking round the room I found there were so many false eyelashes flapping at me that I was beginning to feel a draught. "

― Philip Kerr , March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1)

6 " If he was a member of the human race at all, Neumann was its least attractive specimen. His eyebrows, twitching and curling like two poisoned caterpillars, were joined together by an irregular scribble of poorly matched hair. Behind thick glasses that were almost opaque with greasy thumbprints, his grey eyes were shifty and nervous, searching the floor as if he expected that at any moment he would be lying flat on it. Cigarette smoke poured out from between teeth that were so badly stained with tobacco they looked like two wooden fences. "

― Philip Kerr , March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1)

7 " She was shot dead, in cold blood," he said bitterly. I could see we were in for a long night. I got out my cigarettes. "

― Philip Kerr , March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1)

8 " Behind my office, to the south-east, was Police Headquarters, and I imagined all the good hard work that was being done there to crack down on Berlin's crime. Villainies like speaking disrespectfully of the Führer, displaying a 'Sold Out' sign in your butcher's shop window, not giving the Hitler Salute, and homosexuality. That was Berlin under the National Socialist Government: a big, haunted house with dark corners, gloomy staircases, sinister cellars, locked rooms and a whole attic full of poltergeists on the loose, throwing books, banging doors, breaking glass, shouting in the night and generally scaring the owners so badly that there were times when they were ready to sell up and get out. But most of the time they just stopped up their ears, covered their blackened eyes and tried to pretend that there was nothing wrong. Cowed with fear, they spoke very little, ignoring the carpet moving underneath their feet, and their laughter was the thin, nervous kind that always accompanies the boss's little joke. "

― Philip Kerr , March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1)

9 " Berlin. I used to love this old city. But that was before it had caught sight of its own reflection and taken to wearing corsets laced so tight that it could hardly breathe. I loved the easy, carefree philosophies, the cheap jazz, the vulgar cabarets and all of the other cultural excesses that characterized the Weimar years and made Berlin seem like one of the most exciting cities in the world. "

― Philip Kerr , March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1)

10 " I had to admit one thing. If Haupthändler had killed the Pfarrs then he was as cool as a treasure chest in fifty fathoms of water. "

― Philip Kerr , March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1)

11 " So I sat down on the stairs and removed my shoes and socks, putting them on again in reverse order, with the socks over the shoes. It’s an old trick, favoured by burglars, for muffling the sound of shoe-leather on a hard surface. "

― Philip Kerr , March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1)

12 " inspection. "

― Philip Kerr , March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1)

13 " There’s only one thing that unnerves me more than the company of an ugly woman in the evening, and that’s the company of the same ugly woman the following morning. "

― Philip Kerr , March Violets (Bernie Gunther, #1)