The Quest
by Nelson DeMille
(Center Street, 2014)
When you ask questions for forty years and no one answers, it can only mean that you are dead.
Page 3.
The old man’s biggest regret, he thought, was that he would die in ignorance - that as a consequence of the two score years of being held in darkness, he knew less than the simplest peasant did about his world. He did not regret the dying - that held no special terror for him - but the thought of dying without knowing what the world had come to in his absence was a peculiarly sad thing.
Page 5.
Priests, reporters, and vultures were attracted to death; they all had work to do.
Page 35.
The dangerous thing about civil war is that the battle lines change like spaghetti bouncing in a colander. … As long as you travel with one side or the other, you are part of their baggage train. But if you get caught in between or out on the fringes and try to get back in, you become arrestable. … You must never appear to be arrestable. The business of armies, besides fighting, is arrest and execution.
Pages 54 -55.
As in most third world armies, Purcell knew, the weapons of modern war were more for the sound and the fury than anything else. The artillery barrages were small compared to modern armies, and most of the ordnance went wide of the mark. The real killing was done in a manner that hadn’t changed much in two thousand years - the knife, the spear, the scimitar, and sometimes the bayonet of the rifles without ammunition.
Page 58.
A beaten army was a dangerous thing, Purcell understood, much more than a victorious one. Morale is bad, respect for superiors is bad, and tempers are rotten. … The embarrassment of defeat. It leads to rape, pillage, and random murder. It’s a sort of catharsis for the soldiers who can’t beat the other soldiers.
Page 58.
A soldier’s pay is never enough. You must also believe in the cause.
Page 73.
Women are loyal to men who don’t deserve loyalty.
Page 122.
Sex has consequences beyond the act.
Page 122.
The answer is in our hearts.
Page 168.
The fact that the gospels differ actually give them credibility. These are men recording form memory what they saw and experienced, and the differences show they were not colluding to make up a sstory.
Pages 162-163.
This is a spiritual journey before it becomes a physical journey.
Page 163.
Purcell easily understood how early humans believed in the sun as God; it acted in mysterious ways, it rose and set in the heavens and it gave life and light. The religion of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims, however, was more complex. They asked people to believe in things that could not be seen or felt like the sun on his face. They asked for faith. They asked that you believe it because it was impossible.
Page 169.
For a writer, a journey of a thousand miles begins in a library and ends at the typewriter.
Page 175.
You can never do wrong by doing right.
Page 212.
It doesn’t matter what happens, as long as it happens to us together.
Page 217.
People gravitated toward the hotel bars in times of stress. They came to get news, or hear rumors, or because there actually is safety in numbers.
Page 263.
The places that once held good memories were best left as memories.
Page 275.
We could weep for the whole world, but that won’t change the world.
Page 283.
If you believe in love, you believe in God.
Page 454.