Alistair MacLean's Death Train Quotes

Every man is what environment and heredity make him.

Big crime is big business, and big criminals are big businessmen, running their illegal activities with all the meticulous care and administrative precision of their more law-abiding colleagues.

The moment when a man hears that a girl's fiance has died only that day is the last moment that that man should ever begin to fall in love with her, but I'm afraid that's just how it was. The emotions are no respecters of the niceties, the proprieties and decencies of this life.

To all things an end, to every night its dawn; even to the longest night when dawn never comes, there comes at last the dawn.

There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die—that takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough. We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he, too, is brave and afraid like all the rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer.

The Peacemaker Colt has now been in production, without change in design, for a century. ... It is the oldest hand-gun in the world, without question the most famous and, if efficiency in its designated task of maiming and killing be taken as criterion of its worth, then it is also probably the best hand-gun ever made.

When one searches any place, be it a gypsy caravan or a baronial mansion, methodically and exhaustively, one has to wreck it completely in the process.

With a face and a figure and an acting talent like that, she could have had Hollywood tramping a path of beaten gold to her doorstep.

The Major Smiths of this world don't drive over the edge of a cliff. Quotation from the future Mrs. Schaffer. The Major Smiths of this world don't fall off the roofs of cable cars. Quotation from the future. Mrs. Schaffer's future husband.

It is no small thing, Major, to be lost in a blizzard in the night skies over war-torn Europe.

They'll be coming for you, Mr. Jones. They'll be coming any moment now. I hate to say this, but I must. It is my duty to warn you what will happen to you, an enemy spy. You'll be tortured, Mr. Jones—not simply everyday tortures like pulling out your teeth and toe-nails, but unspeakable tortures I can't mention with Miss Ellison here—and then you'll finish in the gas chambers. If you're still alive. Oh God, when they strip you off and strap you down on the torture table— Two seconds later Carnaby-Jones was over the sill and sliding down the nylon rope. His eyes were screwed tightly shut. Mary said, admiringly: You really are the most fearful liar ever. Schaffer keeps telling me the same thing, Smith admitted. You can't all be wrong.

This won't look so good in my obituary, Schaffer said dolefully. There was a perceptible edge of strain under the lightly spoken words. Gave his life for his country in a ladies' lavatory in Upper Bavaria.

Schaffer caught her by the shoulders, kissed her briefly and smiled at her. She looked at him in surprise. "Well, aren't you glad to see me?" Schaffer demanded. "I've had a terrible time up there. Good God, girl, I might have been killed." "Not as handsome as you were two hours ago." She smiled, gently touched his face where Carraciola's handiwork with the Schmeisser had left its bloody mark, and added over her shoulder as she climbed into the bus: "And that's as long as you've known me." "Two hours! I've aged twenty years tonight. And that, lady, is one helluva long courtship."

They had come a long way, those gypsies encamped for their evening meal on the dusty greensward by the winding mountain road in Provence. ... A long journey, hot and stifling and endlessly, monotonously repetitive across the already baking plains of Central Europe or slow and difficult and exasperating and occasionally dangerous in the traversing of the great ranges of mountains that had lain in their way.

Kind of a treble agent, see? Schaffer said in a patient explaining tone. That's one better than double.