Espionage Novels Quotes

“We cannot save everyone, can we?’ I said to her as we continued walking on our way. I turned my head back only to find the spot the beggar had occupied empty.

‘Not everyone,’ she said. She took my hand once more in hers, kissed the back of it, and finished one of the sincerest axioms I had heard in sometime. ‘We must save,’ she said, ‘only the ones we can while we can.’

Leila Bakr, in A TIME TO LOVE IN TEHRAN, and speaking to her love, John Lockwood”
― C.G. Fewston

“A place without secrets hardly seems the proper venue for a spymaster... Orlovsky chose to hold court in the demimonde, a milieu in which he seemed to proclaim his presence with characteristic audacity. However, M. Orlovsky was one of those camouflaged insects that blends into its surroundings and thus remains hidden in plain sight.”
― Gary Inbinder, The Man Upon the Stair: A Mystery in Fin de Siecle Paris

“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