David L. Robbins > Quotes

“Every man has a cemetery inside him. You don’t know how big yours is until you dig in it.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“It’s how we train.” “To drown?” “To never quit. Ever.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“Heitor sipped his tea, a dainty counterpoint to the violent topic.”
― David L. Robbins, The Betrayal Game

“Changing the way a man thought could be done by teaching him. Altering the way he reacted without thought meant tampering with his instincts.”
― David L. Robbins, The Devil's Waters

“as the taint of getting involved with anything CIA. You never got more than half the story from them, and half of that was a lie.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“If a man sees an evil, let him change it with his hand. If he cannot, then with his tongue. If he cannot, then with his heart, but this is the weakest faith.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“I don’t need to know. So neither do you.” LB snorted. “Funny how the people who say that are never the ones with parachutes on.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“Whoever occupies a territory imposes on it his own social system.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“It’s not over when a man lays down his gun. The question remains as to which fellow will pick up the weapon next. That’s politics.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“Then, as they will, the riches overtook knowledge, and the people lost the ways to keep their wealth flowing.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“This isn’t combat. It’s diplomacy.” “Diplomacy with guns is combat.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“Why do you go like this? Are you a thief?” “I’m going to kill him.” Shadows from the lamplight shifted on the old man’s features as he tilted his head. “What did he do?” “He kidnapped my wife.” “How do you know this?” “He threatened it. And it has been done.” The man stepped nearer the pickup, raising the lantern to see Arif better. “Truly?” “Truly.” “Is it tha’r?” A revenge killing. “Yes.” The old one kept the lantern high while he studied Arif from below. His tongue worked inside his cheeks, behind his gray beard. In the light, the man was not so old and blue-eyed. He pointed to the big house behind the wall. “You know who he is? This family, the Bayt Ba-Jalal?” “I know very well.” The old man squinted. “You have killed before?” “A long time ago.” “So you understand?” “Yes.” Slowly, the man inclined his head to Arif as if in the presence of someone exalted. “Insha’Allah.” If God wills. He turned to gesture the younger one forward. This man came leading the mule. The elder took the animal by the bridle while the younger man stepped onto the pickup truck bed. He was burly and the truck’s springs sagged under him. He bent, clasping his hands to make a step. The old man shook the lantern at Arif. “Up you go, then.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“God is about fear, a way to make you afraid and obey. The man of the forest is without fear.”
― David L. Robbins, War of the Rats: A Novel

“Long experience had taught him that fear lay in the next moment, not in this one.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“You have no fear?” “I don’t let it make my decisions for me.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“Muhammad tells us the services due from one Muslim to another are six. If you meet him, greet him. If he invites you, accept. If he asks your advice, give it. If he sneezes, tell him God bless you. If he falls sick, visit him. And if he dies, walk in his funeral.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“This was Khalil’s doing, and Josh’s, and the three nations that could find no better way than stealing her.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“In weeks or months, the rest of eastern Europe will become Soviet puppets as well. Tens of millions of people are to be subjugated to the communist will, against their own.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“They were reminded over and over that the Qur’an held 124 verses about dealing kindly with non-Muslims, while only one advocated waging war against them.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“LB didn’t have to inquire where Josh was. Among the curtains, white linens, IV lines, monitors, gray faces, and baby blue scrubs, Josh’s private room would be the one between two Saudi army guards wearing berets and automatic weapons.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“Then Arif was allowed to enter Care Rehabilitation, the Kingdom’s response to 9/11, after fifteen of the nineteen hijackers turned out to be Saudis.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“Panning his sunglasses across Quincy, Jamie, and LB, he spun his finger in small circles. He spoke into the mike curled at his lips. “Spinning up now.” Quincy climbed to his feet. He offered a mitt down to Jamie to lift him, then to LB. Across the pad, through waves of heat off the concrete, the rotors of Pedro 1 accelerated also. Quincy and Jamie hurried away with their packs and carbines. Jamie’s gait showed the strain; Quincy dug a big paw under the boy’s pack to help him along. LB donned his helmet and shouldered his rifle. Wally stayed seated, on the radio recalling Doc from the hospital.”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“desert kept a still tongue, and when”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“She wrenched her eyes shut, squinting in a spasm as the ice inside her fissured and cracked open. Instantly she flew up through it; the water, no longer frozen but warmed now, fell from her, cascaded out of her closed eyes, down her cheeks, into his scooping lips. She flew out and above herself, her body left behind to convulse in his arms. She looked down and saw everything around her, the corpses and hatred, and shame, all of it, out in the open now, shimmering and cleansed in her raining tears. Zaitsev held her. His arms were wings, freeing her from the ice, flying her high into the cloudburst, into the wind blowing through the ruins of the city beneath her, soaking in her rain.”
― David L. Robbins, War of the Rats: A Novel

“May I ask what the signal will be?” “You will play the finale from Die Götterdämmerung.” Lottie thinks: Fitting. Wagner’s depiction of the destruction of Valhalla. The death of the gods. The end of the world.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“Bandy climbs into his jeep. There is hatred on the woman’s face for all of them: the departing Americans, the powerful force sent from a free nation, failed and reluctant, not saviors for them at all; the Russians whom they’ve been taught to dread, despite this placating young officer; and her own neighbors for standing by and saying nothing. Just pawns, Bandy thinks. This outcome was rigged long before it was played out, decided not on the battlefield but in some quiet room somewhere in Washington or Moscow, with pencils and rulers for weapons. Warlords and politicians have turned the whole world into a game board. Money and power are more prized than lives and blood. History doesn’t have this brave village woman’s name on it. Not like Eisenhower and Roosevelt and Stalin. No. She disappears.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“and live images were of a short, hawk-faced, and slender man, beardless, with a beak nose and distrustful eyes. This”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“The Russian lieutenant steps back to let the American photographer do what he was brought here to do, record for the United States press the Nazi atrocities of Brandenburg prison. Bandy considers the bodies. He turns instead to the line of Nazi guards. He walks close to the first, raising the camera, focusing tight on the man’s face. The Nazi is still as wax. These are the features of evil, Bandy thinks, not the dead piled at the wall. We’ll see the dead time and again in every war, every conflict. But this wicked man. This is what we have to be on watch for. This is what we must recognize and stamp out of humanity. Bandy levels the viewfinder. It’s a common face, not inhuman and twisted. Not beautiful and mesmerizing. A typical, grocery store, gas station, salesclerk face in Germany, or America. Waiting for the shot, Bandy questions, how to spot them? They look like the rest of us. The Nazi smirks. Bandy thinks, There you are, you fuck, and releases the shutter.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin

“GAARV”
― David L. Robbins, The Empty Quarter

“He hadn’t wanted to, but not watching seemed to take too much effort. It was easy to see. It is too easy to recall. The gun smoke drifted away and the executioners said nothing, as though the smoke were the last evidence of those sixty German lives, and when it was cleansed by the wind the episode was cleansed too. The Red soldiers all shouldered their hot rifles and turned to the west, to return the way they’d come. The bodies were left in the road unburied. Ilya hung back, looking at the gray heap, sixty, a massive jumble. He tried to sense the life that had been spilled, the stories that would never happen, children unfathered, and that was the first moment the war became nothing. They were bodies and he had seen bodies. The good news was they were German bodies. That was all Ilya felt, the good news and nothing.”
― David L. Robbins, The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin