Brian Haig > Quotes

“They could rename this town shithole and be accused of putting on airs.”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“Katherine is a lawyer, as I said, and she doesn’t lie; the truth, however, after it passes through her lips can be unrecognizable.”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“stereotypes are such dangerous stuff; they narrow your frame of mind, and shape your reference and behavior.”
― Brian Haig, Man In The Middle

“Unlike magnets, opposites do not necessarily attract; sometimes they merely bash one another to death.”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“The lady in the latrine, Julie DuBois, and I were on our first date after three weeks of shameless flirting. I’m about forty, Julie’s about thirty—a PhD in English lit, a professor at American University, learned, tenured, brilliant, blonde, blue-eyed—and, not that it matters, also quite attractive. I had been looking forward to this date for a week; I really wanted to get Julie’s take on Marcel Proust’s persistent use of subordinate clauses, a literary mystery I can never seem to get out of my mind—and yes, Julie was having trouble believing that, too. But men who date women for their looks alone are pigs.”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“Men have two brains in constant warfare over the body’s blood supply. When one wins, the other shuts down.”
― Brian Haig, Man In The Middle

“doting, the guy on the sideline at”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“I was racing to pull on my pants, since it seemed ridiculous to be standing in my underwear as the deputy head of Russia’s spy agency spilled his guts about some earthshaking plot.”
― Brian Haig, The Kingmaker

“Nearly all the best soldiers out there, if you scratched the surface, they all had a little bit of psychopath hidden somewhere in there. With some of them, you didn’t have to scratch the surface real deep. A completely sane and balanced man is a fish out of water on a battlefield.”
― Brian Haig, Secret Sanction

“When I see a nail, I reach for a hammer. They study the nail and obsess over whether it might actually be, or could possibly be turned into, a bolt or a screw, and then they try playing mind games. As often as not, the nail screws them.”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“A man of few words is often a man of few thoughts; or he can be someone whose thoughts are best kept to himself.”
― Brian Haig, Man In The Middle

“I recalled the old saw about why reporters always whistle when they are on the toilet; it’s the only way they can remember which end to wipe.”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“Life is pitiless to the elderly.”
― Brian Haig, The Kingmaker

“So I nodded, which Fred took as an indication to continue. “Everything in the theater and the army was in chaos. Iraq exploded in violence. I was the deputy commandant at the Castle, and got overnight orders to proceed to Iraq on the next flight.”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“I'm with the federal government, Drummond, Trust me is another way of saying I'm lying.”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“After seventy years of struggle and turmoil, it all came down to this; the fate of the world’s last great empire hinged on a titanic struggle between two men—one ordained to go down as the most pathetically naïve general secretary ever; the other an obnoxious, loudmouthed lush.”
― Brian Haig, The Hunted

“Thirty years of practicing law on both sides of the bench had converted him from a mild liberal to a fairly rabid one. And like every liberal judge in the country—in his opinion, like any judge with half a brain—”
― Brian Haig, The Hunted

“I stepped over toys and broken furniture and bits and parts of machinery until I entered what was supposed to be a living room, though it looked more like a storage bin for chaos.”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“is the business of soldiers, and lawyers talk a lot but don’t shoot a lot, so we’re seen as an inconvenience or an annoyance, or an evil, but certainly not as part of the brotherhood.”
― Brian Haig, Secret Sanction

“appeared on Fox News as a military analyst, and this is”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“a thousand sins can be overcome by one great virtue;”
― Brian Haig, Man In The Middle

“The army has enough regulations that even Mother Teresa was guilty of something.”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“I wanted to shake her awake and ask what she saw in Mr. Moneybags. But having now met him, he was everything most women dream of—handsome, filthy rich, smart, filthy rich, principled, filthy rich, and with a very pleasant personality.”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“Option one—whirl around,”
― Brian Haig, The President's Assassin

“In a vast nation with more than forty languages and dialects, and nearly as many different ethnic groups, there was only one unifying factor, one common thread—nearly every citizen in the Soviet Union had been scorched by their bureau in one way or another. Not directly, perhaps. But somebody dear, or at least close: grandfathers purged by Stalin; fathers who had disappeared and rotted in the camps under Brezhnev; aunts and uncles brought in for a little rough questioning under Andropov. Something. Nearly every family tree had at least one branch crippled or lopped off by the boys from the Lubyanka.”
― Brian Haig, The Hunted

“don’t”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“THERE ARE times in life when the wrong thing to do is actually the right thing to do. Maybe vice versa, too. I don’t know. I haven’t gotten around to testing that theory yet.”
― Brian Haig, Secret Sanction

“enter.” “This is a joke, right?”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“Predictably, Katherine’s car was a leased Toyota Prius, what they call a hybrid, and, though I consider myself as sensitive to the assassination of our environment as anybody, Sean Drummond was not the least bit happy with this choice. The car didn’t even require a key to get started, just this stupid button you push, then you can’t even hear the engine, so after the fifth time I punched the button, Katherine said, “Stop that, Sean. The damned car is already started.”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew

“Guilt is a relative term, as are fairness, justice, and punishment.”
― Brian Haig, The Night Crew