236 Quotes by Robert Harris

You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.

If you are afraid of wolves, keep out of the woods. - J. V. Stalin, 1936

Acceptance. That, he had learned in Russia many years ago, was the secret of survival. ... Accept it. Wait. Let the system exhaust itself. Protest will only raise your blood pressure.

Gratitude", he said, quoting Stalin, "is a dog's disease.

Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?

Time. Now here is a peculiar commodity, boy. The measurement of time. Best accomplished, obviously, with a watch. But, lacking a watch, a man may use instead the ebb and flow of light and dark. Lacking, however, a window through which to see such movement, the reliance must be devolved upon some inner mechanism of the mind. But if the mind has received a shock, the mechanism is disturbed, and time becomes as the ground is to a drunkard, variable.

A dog looks up to you, a cat looks down on you, but a pig looks you straight in the eye.

He felt more human with his boots on. A man can face the world with something on his feet.

She didn't say goodbye. She set off up the street, dodging the pedestrians, walking fast. He watched her, waiting to see if she might look back. But of course she didn't. He knew she wouldn't. She wasn't the looking-back kind.