I Am Pilgrim
by Terry Hayes
(Corgi Books, Transworld Publishers, London, 2013)
It’s hard not to admire good planning.
Page 11.
Sex today sure isn’t for sissies.
Page 13.
I know this woman. We all do - the type, anyway. You see them in the huge new Prada store in Milan, queuing outside the clubs in Soho, sipping skinny lattes in the hot cafés on the avenue Montaigne - young women who mistake People magazine for news and a Japanese symbol on their backs for a sign of rebellion.
Page 13.
I’ve always been pretty much on the outside of any side you can find.
Page 21.
Nobody’s ever been arrested for a murder, they have only ever been arrested for not planning it properly.
Page 26.
I’ve learned from bitter experience not to say anything unless you’re certain.
Pages 29-30.
It was a dead British orator and writer who was on my mind. Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for - justice, decency, humanity - and I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had violated our nation’s deepest values in order to protect them.
Page 76.
Despite my many affairs with other substances, intelligence has always been my real drug.
Page 80.
The world doesn’t change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.
Page 83.
If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.
Page 86.
The problem with the spy business, though, is that while you can resign you can never leave.
Page 90.
People’s you’ve hurt don’t forget.
Page 90.
It’s nice to know the identity of the people who’ve come to kill you.
Page 91.
Every life leaves a trace.
Page 103.
In the absence of democracy and efficient bureaucracies, wasta is the way the Arab world works; it means connections, influence, a web of old favours and tribal history.
Page 108.
The one thing you don’t do in any Arab country is accuse a man of lying, no matter how indirectly.
Page 116.
People told me later it was a howl of grief, but I knew it wasn’t. It was the primal scream of birth.
Page 119.
Despite its huge wealth, vast oil reserves and love of high-tech American armaments, nothing really works in Saudi Arabia.
Page 120.
Education is a grab for a better future, no matter how impossible the prospect may seem at the time.
Page 121.
Life lives on in our children and their children, and not even a king can take that away.
Page 123.
A man gets burnt out long before his reputation.
Page 190.
I’m a helluva good liar when I need to be.
Page 195.
In the secret world, a disguise and life story that have been invented to hide someone’s real identity is called a legend.
Page 200.
Fate favours the bad as often as the good.
Page 228.
The prisoners weren’t people to him, they were a gift from God.
Page 299.
This is the unalloyed truth: without an effective vaccine, no country on earth could survive an orchestrated smallpox attack.
Page 313.
In the army - as in life - sometimes you had to create a crisis in order to get people’s attention.
Page 329.
“A virus isn’t exactly alive,” he continued, “but it’s certainly not dead. It can’t live outside the host - in this case, the human body.
“The faster it destroys the host, the faster the epidemic wanes.”
Page 351.
When you don’t have anything else, you go with what you’ve got.
Page 352.
The one thing which no intelligence agency in the world could deal with was a cleanskin. Where did you start with a person who had no history, no form, no record?
Page 361.
The effectiveness of any operation is in inverse proportion to the umber of people used.
Page 362.
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.
Page 367.
Dark omens or not, life has a way of cornering us. A person either stands up or he doesn’t.
Page 384.
More agents were lost to gossip, speculation and inadvertent comments than to any other cause.
Page 393.
There was nothing you could call genuine security: as usual, too many guns, not enough brains.
Pages 419-420.
Men - even young men - in the Muslim world take the obligations of friendship far more seriously than their counterparts in the West.
Page 421.
It was a lot easier to dump a car than a tail.
Page 428.
Hope was even more dangerous than despair.
Page 453.
The was the trouble with luck - it ran out.
Page 495.
The way the world had developed, if you had to cross a border, it was safer to be a hypocrite than a man of God.
Page 503.
Apart from banking, Frankfurt’s major commercial activity was hosting huge conventions and trade fairs - all at a specially constructed showground called the Messe.
Page 504.
The real measure of a successful execution wasn’t in the obituary but in the escape.
Page 517.
The single worst thing to do when you have broken into a home is to use a flashlight - light leaks out, and nothing alerts a neighbour or passer-by faster than a beam of light sweeping around inside a house. The soft glow of a lamp, on the other hand, seems normal.
Page 598.
The mistake that most people make when they want to stop someone from seeing material is to encrypt it, which means that a person like me knows exactly where to look.
Page 620.
Information didn’t exist until it had been safely transmitted.
Page 631.
Evidence is the name we give to what we have, but what abut the things we haven’t found? Sometimes the things that are missing are of far greater importance.
Page 652.
If you’re going to kill a man, far better it’s a monster than a loving father.
Page 676.
All airborne viruses … were far more contagious in cold conditions, and most experts estimate that such conditions accelerate their transmission by at least 30 per cent. The reasons are straightforward - people cough and sneeze ore, they take the bus instead of walking, they eat inside restaurants and not at sidewalk cafés. As the temperature drops, population unwittingly wind themselves more closely together and provide a far better environment fort the transfer of viral material.
Pages 691-692.
The three agents were hard guys, the youngest of them in his twenties, a man whose IQ was so low I figured they had to water him twice a day.
Page 707.
Sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.
Page 716.
Given the chance, Americans always rise to the occasion. Betray them and you’ve lost ‘em.
Page 716.
I didn’t know it, but apparently time passed slowly when you were waiting for the end of the world.
Page 761.
Experience had taught him that wishing didn’t count for anything.
Page 764.
Life was duty. Like any soldier going into battle, I thought of the conflict that lay ahead. To be honest, I didn’t hope for success or glory. I just hoped that I would acquit myself with honour and courage.
Page 786.
It isn’t an easy thing to do - to walk knowingly into harm’s way.
Page 788.
I think good manners are very important when you are being led to your death. It also meant that, if everything went to hell, I would have a clear field of fire in front of me.
Page 793.
I wandered past the stacks of drying wood, thinking about how many great skills the world had lost, how many things of value had passed without any of us even noticing. The old men with their chisels and hand saws were once the most highly paid members of their community, and what had we put in their place? Financial engineers and young currency traders.
Pages 878-879.
I had always thought that there was nothing quite so sad as an abandoned boat.
Page 879.