“In wartime people took action because of what they believed in. In peacetime people were driven by their private concerns.”

“Hes more a shape in a drape than a hep cat”

“Lately Mirabelle had reflected wistfully if people even noticed her a smartly dressed woman who came and went along the Promenade, always alone.”

“Wellsted will remember this moment for the rest of his life. It is the first time he desires something for himself that is not dedicated to his own advancement. It is the moment he falls in love.”

“She was herself in their company but a very specific version of herself.”

“It took a certain kind of person to come from luxury and seek out danger.”

“He had spent much of his childhood perched on the coast, with the taste of salt in the air: this was a place of woodland and river, mysterious and secretive in a different way from St. Mawes, the l...”

“A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.”

“[The official prosecutors] ... were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.”

“In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproac...”

“There was a time when a new deputy tried to teach Mr. Fruit about the difference between a red and a green light, but Mr. Fruit had resisted all efforts to reorder what he had been doing perfectly ...”

“Clancy comments that the subtleties of national character can impact the world stage by making espionage more difficult. Americans were quirky by nature, making the sorts of eccentric moves that ha...”

“Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active.”

“Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.”

“There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.”