Finlay Pike’s Reviews > Darkness at Noon > Status Update

“We have jettisoned all the norms and conventions of tennis-court morality, our only guideline is logic … We are sailing without ballast …”

“I have thought and acted as I had to. If I am right, I will have no cause for regret; if I am wrong, then I will pay …”

“… paradise cannot be constructed out of concrete. The bastion will survive but it can no longer serve as an example to the world; it no longer has a message to deliver.”

“The awareness of his complete defeat filled him with something almost like relief; the obligation to continue the struggle, the burden of responsibility, had been lifted from him … Then Rubashov remembered the inscription that had once marked the entrance to the Errancis Cemetery, in which Saint-Just, Robespierre, and their sixteen beheaded comrades were buried. It consisted of two words: Dormir enfin ...”

“Whoever kept staring at the sky instead of hanging onto the swing grew dizzy and tumbled out.”

“History is by definition immoral: history has no conscience. Trying to steer it by the maxims of a Sunday sermon means leaving everything the way it is and putting a spoke in the wheel of progress.”

“But all I know is that we’ve lost. And the ones left are leaving us. Maybe because it’s too cold up there on the path. Maybe it’s too cold here, comrade, in the country. The others have done a fine job warming up their own people. They have music and flags and they’re sitting cozily around a warm stove. Maybe that’s why they won. And why we’re all finished”