“You want a picture of futility? It's a tunnel in the desert, from nowhere to nowhere, four hundred and fifty feet long.”
Page 65.
The Innocent (1990)
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Ian McEwan 80
British author 1948Related quotes

“It is awful to want to go away and to want to go nowhere.”
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I'd probably be a 'Do you want fries with that?' person, because I have nowhere else to go!”
On what she would probably do if she weren't performing.
From the documentary Britney's Redneck Roots. Quote from The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5264115-103689,00.html, unidentified issue.

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Pin-hole as a substitute for the lens, p. 60
“You might have deemed our long gun-deck
Two hundred feet of hell.”
The River Fight (published 1864). Compare: "War is hell", attributed to William Tecumseh Sherman; "This is the soldier brave enough to tell, The glory-dazzled world that 'war is hell'", Henry van Dyke, On the St. Gaudens Statue of Sherman.

Source: To Have and Have Not (1937), Ch. 24
Often misquoted or inaccurately paraphrased as "In every port in the world, at least two Estonians can be found."
Context: At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers. These articles are very popular in Esthonia and bring their authors between a dollar and a dollar and thirty cents a column. They take the place occupied by the baseball or football news in American newspapers and are run under the heading of Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers. No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sun-burned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will set sail to another yacht basin and write another saga. They are very happy too. Almost as happy as the people on the Alzira III. It's great to be an Intrepid Voyager.