Terry Hayes Quotes

Despite its huge wealth, vast oil reserves, and love of high-tech American ornaments, nothing really works in Saudi Arabia.

Several guards and retainers exchanged a glance—Gaza was not somewhere to be taken lightly; it was probably the only place in the world that made Afghanistan look safe.

Like the old virologist had said—sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.

I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty;
I woke, and found that life was duty.

"Twenty-five years ago he was executed."
It shocked me. "Executed?" I said. "For what?"
The director scanned a couple of documents and found the one he was looking for. "The usual—corruption on earth."
"I'm sorry, but what exactly does 'corruption on earth' mean?"
He laughed. "Pretty much whatever we want." Nearly all of his team found it funny too. "In this case," he continued, "it meant that he criticized the royal family and advocated its removal."

A few years after the bonfire of the mob came for him and his family. Like he said, it's always the same—they start out burning books and end up burning people. Out of his parents and five kids, he was the only survivor.
"He passed through three camps in five years—all of them death camps, including Auschwitz. Because it was such a miracle he had survived, I asked him what he had learned.
"He laughed. 'Nothing you call original,' he said. Death's terrible, suffering's worse, as usual the assholes made up the majority—on both sides of the wire.
"Then he thought for a moment. There was one thing the experience had taught him. He said he'd learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you—just listen to them."
Whisperer turned and looked at me. "So that's what you meant, huh? You've been listening to the Muslim fundamentalists?"
"Yes," I replied. "I've heard bombs going off in our embassies, mobs screaming for blood, mullahs issuing death decrees, so-called leaders yelling for jihad. They've been burning books, Dave—the temperature of hate in parts of the Islamic world has gone out to Pluto. And I've been listening to them."
"And you don't think we have—the people in Washington?" He said it without anger. I was at one time a leading intelligence agent and I think he genuinely wanted to know.
"Maybe in your heads. Not in your gut."

Crime intelligence reports from any police force in Europe would tell you that half of Albania was involved in the murder-for-hire business.

The old Nobel Laureate in Virginia had been right when he had asked if the greatest industrial nation in history actually produced goods and machinery anymore. Millions of jobs, along with most of the country’s manufacturing base, had been exported over the decades and a great deal of the nation’s safety disappeared with them.

The driver thought I was crazy—but then his religion thinks stoning a woman to death for adultery is reasonable, so I figured we were about even.

I went to open the front passenger’s door. It was locked and she indicated the rear seat. Apparently it was okay for a Muslim woman to lead a man to his death but not to share the front seat with him.

He came toward me and I realized I was being given the singular honor denied to so many dictators and mass murderers—I was going to be thrown out of a Swiss bank.

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. That was the lesson I learned that day, and I’ll be forever grateful I did—some years later, deep in the ruins called the Theater of Death, it salvaged everything.

I had read about it, of course, but I had never actually seen the machinery of a totalitarian state in full flight. For anyone who values privacy and freedom it’s a terrifying thing to behold.

The Saracen approached them and lifted the woman’s robe in order to examine her more closely. Underneath, he saw that her cotton shirt was crumpled and ripped and her jeans had lost the buttons at the fly. He couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to her on the trip—the outlaws who abducted her might have been devout Muslims but they were also men. Her tattered shirt barely covered her belly, and the Saracen, being a doctor, guessed from the sight of it that she was about four months pregnant. A different man—a less religious and a more humane man—might have been affected by it. But not the Saracen—the prisoners weren’t people to him, they were a gift from God.

I mean, there’s no better alibi than being dead, is there?