236 Quotes by Robert Harris

This was the problem with drinks parties: getting stuck with a person you didn't want to talk to while someone you did was tantalisingly in view.

The destination of the journey could not be altered, only the manner in which one approached it - whether one chose to walk erect or to be dragged complaining through the dust.

People perish. Books are immortal.

Down in the cellar the Gestapo were licensed to practice was the Ministry of Justice called ‘heightened interrogation’. The rules had been drawn up by civilised men in warm offices and they stipulated the presence of a doctor.

...it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre...

For them, it was just an ordinary miracle.

Nature has granted man no better gift than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs are numb, sight, bearing, gait, even the teeth and alimentary organs die before we do, and yet this period is reckoned a portion of life." - Pg. 82

By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.

Civilization was a relentless war that man was doomed to lose eventually. - Pg. 195