Alex Gerlis > Quotes

“A man stood in a church and told people what was good and what was bad: they did not question what they were told, and lived their lives accordingly.  I often wonder what life would be like if we still lived like that today.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Berlin Spies

“It was late in the afternoon of the last Monday in November and the arms of a true Prussian winter had started to wrap themselves around Berlin”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“The silence hummed around the already very silent room.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“hedges that had slightly bothered him with ease.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“a confirmed fascist and of Anti-Bolshevik and Anti-Jewish ideas.’ In 1945, Freeman joined the Waffen SS. He was prominent on a MI9 ‘British Renegades Warning List’ and was captured at the end of the war. Back in the UK he was court-martialled by the RAF in September 1945”
― Alex Gerlis, The Berlin Spies

“had poured himself another glass of something that to Henry tasted like liquorice-flavoured acid.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Swiss Spy

“graveyard was wrapped protectively”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“Everything starts off by being confused. And then you realise what you have to do and you go and do it and everything becomes clearer. And then, things get in the way. Events. People. Places. Emotions become involved, even if you don’t intend them to or even want them to. So you end up being confused again.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“Don’t worry. It is not a crime to love the wrong person. Most people manage it at least once in their lives.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“Everyone was his enemy, Basil. That, I’m afraid, is a consequence of serving more than one master.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Swiss Spy

“She carried on walking. Heading east, always heading east. It didn’t take long for the village to fade behind her as if it’d never existed, like a strange dream,”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“as a secret agent he inhabited a world of subterfuge, crime and deceit – one wrapped in shadows and constant menace in which none of its inhabitants could claim to be very high up any moral order.”
― Alex Gerlis, Vienna Spies

“In the strange half world in which he now lived, he knew better than to ask.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“Don’t worry. In time. Everyone here has a story too big to tell. That’s the story of Europe now.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“And that was it. Her new life stuffed into a knapsack and the pockets of her jacket.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“radio’s signal rather than any noise,”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“I gave you a dose of sodium barbiturate and you’ve been asleep for two days, nearly three, in fact.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“complicity of the Swiss banks in the Nazi war effort. However, it is well established there was an active relationship, to say the least, between the Reichsbank and most of the major Swiss banks, including Bank Leu. Bank Leu was an independent bank until it became part of Credit Suisse in 1990.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Swiss Spy

“What are they, then?’ ‘They’re Germans, Your Excellency. They only changed their name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha because of the Great War.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Second Traitor

“she’d exchanged Jesus Christ for Karl Marx,”
― Alex Gerlis, Vienna Spies

“he walked up and down the Champs Élysées, with the infatuation common to all first-time visitors to the city”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“He stayed in the field of intelligence for a couple of years after the war, but found the Cold War altogether too chilly.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“I need hardly tell you the world of espionage is not one of glamour or excitement. The most common emotions are boredom and fear.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Swiss Spy

“It was only when we fell out of the train at this terrible place that I saw German soldiers. From the moment we were arrested here, to when we were taken to Drancy and to when we were put on the train to Poland, it was all French policemen.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“she knew she had to throw Nathalie Mercier and Nathalie Quinn into the Channel and never let them enter her mind again. Any regrets or emotions that Nathalie may have had should go into the sea along with her identity. But she was unsettled. It may be easy enough to discard your identity and the details that go with it, but the emotions – they were an altogether different matter. On”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“Honvéd,’ answered Bartos, looking very slightly offended that Edgar even needed to ask the question. ‘The team of Puskás: you’ve heard of Puskás?”
― Alex Gerlis, The Berlin Spies

“FTP?’ Captain Archibald asked. ‘I do beg your pardon. Stands for Francs-Tireurs et Partisans.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“It is what comes in the wake of an invading army that’s the true measure of a conquest.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“The buildings are the heart of a city. The people come and go and give it its soul, but the fabric of the buildings, the style and atmosphere they evoke – that’s what gives a city its character.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies

“The thick-framed glasses held together by tape and the uncombed hair pulled back tightly had turned her into one of the anonymous grey characters inhabiting the crowd scenes of life.”
― Alex Gerlis, The Best of Our Spies