Quotes from book

The Quiet American

“So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.”

“Sooner or later…one has to take sides – if one is to remain human.”

“Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.”

“Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

“You cannot love without intuition.”

“I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.”

“Innocence is a kind of insanity”

“From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year… death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.”

“God save us always," I said, "from the innocent and the good.”

“Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?”

“I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”

“He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.”

“The hurt is in the act of possession; we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower.”

“Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there.”

“What right had I to value her less than the bodies in the square? Suffering is not increased by numbers; one body can contain all the suffering the world can feel. I had judged like a journalist, in terms of quantity, and I had betrayed my own principles; I had become as engage as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decision would ever be simple again.”