Joseph Kanon > Quotes

“You know the sultans used to light their garden parties with turtles? They'd put candles on their backs and let them wander around. Hundreds of them.”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“Life is like that, don’t you think? Mostly bad choices. All you can do is keep your balance between them.”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“He was the first young man Alex had met since he arrived, all the others buried or missing, irretrievable. Then a few dragging steps and Alex saw why: a Goebbels clubfoot had kept him out of war.”
― Joseph Kanon, Leaving Berlin

“The first step already taken”
― Joseph Kanon, Defectors

“tryst.”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“You know what Confucius said?” Aaron looked over, surprised. “ ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’ ”
― Joseph Kanon, The Accomplice

“Durak,” he said, spitting it. When”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“he realized that this visit, all his visits, were really trips to a cemetery, paying respects at the grave, the way they had visited his father’s, flowers in hand, his mother solemn, Leon bored and uncomfortable, not knowing, as he did now, that she wasn’t visiting his father but some younger part of herself, what she used to be.”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“You couldn’t fight the next war until you’d lied about the last one.”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“The light now a line of vanishing dolt, like tracer bullets.”
― Joseph Kanon, Leaving Berlin

“Maybe,” Sasha”
― Joseph Kanon, Leaving Berlin

“Even with bad choices, there are worse choices.”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“They stay for each other .The Americans don't leave because the Russians-"He stopped. "But of course they'll have to. It's not reasonable,"he said, a French use of word. "Why would the Russians stay? If Germany were neutral. Not a threat anymore.”
― Joseph Kanon, Leaving Berlin

“in wool skirts and thin shapeless cardigans. “You know who’s also here?”
― Joseph Kanon, Leaving Berlin

“One thing you learn in police work is how to wait. Now you, you hate to wait. You'd make coffee nervous.”
― Joseph Kanon, Los Alamos

“We talk about seasons, he thought, as if they repeated, came back, but they don’t. That spring was gone, irretrievable, a picture in an album, faces smiling, unaware of what would happen to them.”
― Joseph Kanon, Istanbul Passage

“Are you happy?” “Happy?” he said”
― Joseph Kanon, Defectors

“Shabby suits and no stockings, but they had survived, waited in hiding or miraculously escaped, for this new chance, the idea the Nazis hadn’t managed to kill.”
― Joseph Kanon, Leaving Berlin

“How does anyone sleep?"
"You don't hear them after a while," Martin said." You get used to it."
Maybe Martin had, new to Berlin. But what about the others, who remembered huddling in shelters every night , waiting to die, listening to the engine sounds how near?-the whining thrust as the nose was pulled up, free of the weight of it bombs, now floating somewhere overhead.”
― Joseph Kanon, Leaving Berlin

“reality itself become something random, inexplicable.”
― Joseph Kanon, Stardust