Alistair MacLean's Death Train Quotes

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.

She plunged down and kept on going down, driving down to the black floor of the Arctic, driven down by the madly spinning screws, the still thundering engines her own executioner.

She had the best kind of courage, or maybe the worst kind, the kind that gets you into trouble.

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.

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.

"I am sorry, Miss Lemay. This must have been a great shock to you and it's all my fault. Will you come and have a drink with me? You look as if you need one." She dabbed her cheek some more and looked at me in a manner that demolished all thoughts of instant friendship. "I wouldn't even cross the road with you," she said tonelessly. The way she said it indicated that she would willingly have gone half-way across a busy street with me and then abandoned me there. If I had been a blind man.

He says if it's a choice between a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and internment in Switzerland he knows which side of the frontier he's coming down on... After that we fly down the Swiss side of Lake Constance, turn east at Lindau, climb to eight thousand to clear the mountains and it's only a hop, skip and jump to the Weissspitze. I see, Smith said weakly. But—but don't the Swiss object? Frequently, sir.

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.

Cruelty and hate and intolerance are the monopoly of no particular race or creed or time. They have been with us since the world began and are still with us, in every country in the world.

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

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.

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

I was glad I was alive. Glad to be alive. It had been the sort of night that didn’t look like having any morning, but here I was and I was glad. The girls were glad. I was warm and dry and fed, the jonge Genever was happily chasing the red corpuscles in a game of merry-go-round, all the coloured threads were weaving themselves into a beautiful pattern and by day’s end it would be over. I had never felt so good before. I was never to feel so good again.

We know about this deliberate policy admittedly as effective as it is suicidal—of endless provocation, waiting for something, for somebody to break. But please, Major Sherman, please do not try to provoke too many people in Amsterdam. We have too many canals.