79 Quotes by Terry Hayes

As a Swiss writer once said, “We wanted a labor force but human beings came,” and what nobody had foreseen was that those workers would bring their mosques, their holy book, and huge swathes of their culture with them.

As a Turkish proverb says – it was going to be like digging a well with a needle.

Shocking as it was, over 45 percent of Arab women couldn’t read or write.

After all, education is a grab for a better future, no matter how impossible the prospect may seem at the time.

They fill the bottom with nuts and whatever else monkeys like to eat. In the night, a monkey climbs out of the trees and slips his hand down the long neck. He grabs the sweets and his hand makes a fist. That means it’s too big to get back up the narrow neck and he’s trapped. In the morning the villagers come around and hit him on the head.” He looked at me for a moment. “It’s a Zen story, of course,” he said, smiling again. “The point is – if you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.

Heavily armed men in uniform were everywhere, but there was nothing you could call genuine security: as usual, too many guns, not enough intelligence.

I have heard people say love is weak but they’re wrong – love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things – patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And of every kind of love – the epic and the small, the noble and the base – the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all.

Without grace, everyone is running from something.

We’ve got one huge advantage – people believe what they see in databases. They’ve never learned the most important rule of cyberspace – computers don’t lie but liars can compute.