Helen MacInnes > Quotes

“Hardship and danger destroys fewer people than indulgence.”
― Helen MacInnes, While Still We Live

“Americans by the very nature of the soft fat they collected around their brains along with all of their comforts, their total ignorance of historical meanings, their delusion that anarchists were either comic little men plotting nothings in a dark cellar or misunderstood cranks--how could Americans be taken seriously in a world of real politics?”
― Helen MacInnes, Decision at Delphi

“I sometimes think that normal, everyday life is only a delusion. We walk on a think crust of earth which we call peace; and every now and again we can hear a rumble below our feet; and sometimes the crust splits and we see that, underneath there is a glowing inferno ready to erupt. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, but it is always there.”
― Helen MacInnes, Decision at Delphi

“There were some types of men whose wilfulness thrived on the excuses that were made for them. And they were the kind of people who never knew when they had gone far enough in their selfishness, who never knew when to stop. The more allowances that were made for them, the more they presumed.”
― Helen MacInnes, Assignment in Brittany

“No shortage in terrorists, " Grant observed grimly. They came in all dimensions: groups of political fanatics with blind obedience and perverted social conscience; the trained assassin tracking down their victim in a peaceful Austrian village; a boy in a quiet Washington street killing on vicious impulse. All of them, however different they seemed, bent on destruction. All of them, however motivated, with total contempt for human life.”
― Helen MacInnes, Prelude to Terror

“Yes, the Americans and the British were alike in some things. They were surface people, skimming over past history, picking out the interpretations that pleased them, never digging deep for the truths that could warn them. When they found something unpleasant, they would forget it within months. They even prided themselves on not remembering; forget and forgive were so much easier. They evaded serious ideas, unless they approved of them.”
― Helen MacInnes, Decision at Delphi

“Well, a man’s life is divided into two parts: there is his work and there is his own private life. Two small worlds which he has to make for himself. And it is only when he is old, and the time for decision is over, that he may realize he did not need to neglect one for the other. For if he concentrated too much on one of them, then he really confused their purposes. He had thought that either a successful career was life, or life itself was a career. He hadn’t realized that his work and his own private life should be given the same amount of thought, that they should grow along with each other, each influencing the other, each developing the other. Without that balance, he will find himself an incomplete man. That’s the tragic thing about age: to realize you have somehow never seen what is happiness until it was too late to start building it up. For it has to be built. Pleasure is a simple thing: you can choose it, buy it, even have it as a gift. It only depends on your taste. But happiness is much more complicated; you have to build it yourself.”
― Helen MacInnes, Friends and Lovers

“Perhaps emotion, when it is tightly disciplined, turns into worry.”
― Helen MacInnes, Pray for a Brave Heart

“Britain and our friends, by allowing Colonel Bolt’s records to have a grave question mark against your name, would you let that question mark still remain?” Sheila looked puzzled. She was”
― Helen MacInnes, While Still We Live

“People like me who have never suffered—I mean in the way the people of Korytów and all the other millions of Poles are suffering—can afford to be broad-minded. You and the people who have really suffered must think people like me are not only smug, but callous.” “Only if you tell us that it is wrong to hate,”
― Helen MacInnes, While Still We Live

“It is just that I am tired of being told I look at life too simply. It isn’t naïve to believe that good exists, that evil exists. I have known both of them. I’ve seen them. I’ve felt them. They aren’t just ideas that you can twist into neat phrases. They aren’t words to be clever with. They are too vital. We live by them. Or else we make everything meaningless.”
― Helen MacInnes, The Salzburg Connection

“That’s the trouble about regulated ideas: the phrases are never original, the same words keep recurring.”
― Helen MacInnes, Pray for a Brave Heart

“There’s nothing like self-pity for thoroughly dissipating a man. And when a nation indulges in that luxury it finds itself with a dictator.”
― Helen MacInnes, Above Suspicion

“Did terrorists never think of two children when they packed their ideals into a bomb?”
― Helen MacInnes, The Venetian Affair

“am in revolt against the recent fashion of attaching so much weight to political ideology. For the last fifty years, we have paid too much attention to political differences, just as we used to pay too much attention to religious differences.”
― Helen MacInnes, While Still We Live

“He could hear Matthews saying, 'Worry before, and you'll be prepared. Worry afterwards and you'll keep your feet on the ground. But don't worry during action; that's fatal.”
― Helen MacInnes, Assignment in Brittany

“And Mademoiselle Dupre, finding everything unintelligible, was completely reassured: such good-bys were normal among the unfortunate English-speakers, an uncouth language, it affected their minds; or perhaps, poor people, it was not given to all languages to perform with the precision, the clarity, the grace of a French epigram.”
― Helen MacInnes, Pray for a Brave Heart

“Death gave meaning to life, and should be treated with respect. The final act faced all of us; a friend’s death was but a preview of our own.”
― Helen MacInnes, Message from Malaga

“Matthews. For Mr.”
― Helen MacInnes, While Still We Live

“Some day. The most hopeful phrase in man’s language, the most promising in his thoughts, the most unfulfilled.”
― Helen MacInnes, Pray for a Brave Heart

“Some day I’ll come back and enjoy this place, he promised himself. And smiled to himself, knowing only too well that life had a way of never giving you the time to come back.”
― Helen MacInnes, Pray for a Brave Heart

“grace that her training had made natural for her. Did she ever think of ballet, now? Madame Aleksander wondered.”
― Helen MacInnes, While Still We Live

“Tomorrow, he thought, sounds wonderful: a day for oneself, a day to stretch out on a soft piece of green grass under a birch tree—the kind that had invited him today as he walked toward Falken, with its delicate leaves showing blue sky between them; a book to read, sleep to come softly; no one talking, questioning; no one to worry about, whether friend or enemy. A day to be kept for oneself.”
― Helen MacInnes, Pray for a Brave Heart

“head. “You will not tell?” She shook her head again. “But how else can we believe you? You mean you are willing to be shot as a spy rather than give his name?” “Would his name”
― Helen MacInnes, While Still We Live

“remember the name of the firm which he owned. She”
― Helen MacInnes, While Still We Live

“resent this man. Why should the happiness of the whole civilised world depend on him?”
― Helen MacInnes, Above Suspicion

“He had been there to warn Dutka’s wife and boy. It was an idea of his own, but it worked. They got away.” “The captain? Thaddeus?” “The Germans were still searching when I left. The searchlights had been brought up.” “There’s a chance, isn’t there, Jan?” “There’s always a chance.” But his voice was heavy, and his shoulders drooped. Sheila’s next question about Korytów”
― Helen MacInnes, While Still We Live

“He passed the first six houses with sadness rather than distaste. They tried so hard, he thought. The Crescent in Edinburgh had been a row of houses all very much alike, too. But similarity, when it has money behind it, becomes a solid wall of convention, of permanence, even of defiance. Similarity, conceived and born in poverty, becomes an inferiority complex.”
― Helen MacInnes, Friends and Lovers

“I resent this man. Why should the happiness of the whole civilised world depend on him?”
― Helen MacInnes, Above Suspicion

“Streets are like children, David thought; the small ones go to bed first.”
― Helen MacInnes, Friends and Lovers