Alan Furst Quotes

“But the world doesn't run on logic, it runs on the seven deadly sins and the weather. - Alan Furst; Red Gold”

“For Mercier, it was the ceremony of the mass that eased his soul: the sweetish smoke trailing from the censer, the ringing of the bell, the Latin incantations of the priest. In Warsaw, he attended early mass, at a small church near the apartment, once or twice a month, confessing to his vocational sins – duplicity, for example – in the oblique forms provided by Catholic protocol. He’d grown up an untroubled believer, but the war had put an end to that. What God could permit such misery and slaughter? But, in time, he had found consolation in a God beyond understanding and prayed for those he’d lost, for those he loved, and for an end to evil in the world.” ― Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw”

“One of the key things I did to stay on my diet is I never allowed myself to get hungry. As soon as I got hungry, I'd eat healthy foods.”

“The first thing I did on my diet was take the batteries out of the remote control and make myself get up and change the channel. That's probably the hardest exercise I did.”

“I'll make a diet cheesecake, but I'll put it in a Sara Lee box. Or I'll have a huge bowl of pasta, but it's actually just a cup of pasta - the rest is vegetables. It makes me feel less deprived.”

“I tell people I'm on a diet. If somebody sees me with a muffin, they'll think I'm off my diet. It's like secret little police that I've made for myself.”

“For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.”

“We're the roughest people in the way we play and live, and that is because Americans come from people who all got up one morning and went 5,000 miles, and that was a time in the 19th century when it wasn't so easy to do.”

“I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.”

“In return for their faithful service, they would receive Red Army food rations, which amounted to a generous ladle, twice daily, from a cauldron into which all appropriated food was thrown. The stew boiled twenty-four hours a day, a fatty broth of onions, roosters, rabbits, dead horse, turnips - whatever they happened on in the course of their collecting forays - the Red Army essentially lived off the countryside.”