1
For Mercier, it was the ceremony of the mass that eased his soul: the sweetish smoke trailing from the censer, the ringing of the bell, the Latin incantations of the priest. In Warsaw, he attended early mass, at a small church near the apartment, once or twice a month, confessing to his vocational sins — duplicity, for example — in the oblique forms provided by Catholic protocol. He’d grown up an untroubled believer, but the war had put an end to that. What God could permit such misery and slaughter? But, in time, he had found consolation in a God beyond understanding and prayed for those he’d lost, for those he loved, and for an end to evil in the world.” ― Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw.Alan Furst
2
Home at that moment was a starless night, a steady wind, not a human to be seen.Alan Furst
3
A moment comes, and if you wish to look at yourself as human, you must take some kind of action. Otherwise, you can read the newspapers and congratulate yourself on your good fortune.Alan Furst
4
Whether they loved each other or not, they were lovers. And he was damned if he'd see her sucked into this brutal business.Alan Furst
5
But the world doesn't run on logic, it runs on the seven deadly sins and the weather. - Alan Furst; Red GoldAlan Furst
6
And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini's armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn't sure what came next. So, don't trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.Alan Furst
7
Having lived in a mythical country, a place neither here nor there, these intellectuals from Vilna and Gomel helped create another and called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Such a name! It was hardly a union. The Soviets - workers’ councils - ruled it for about six weeks; socialism impoverished everybody, and only machine guns kept the republics from turning into nations. But to Szarza and the rest it didn’t matter. He’d put his life on the line, preferring simply to die at the wrong end of a gun rather than the wrong end of a club, and for twelve years - until 1929, when Stalin finally took over - he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic, intellectual Jews actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer. .Alan Furst
8
In return for their faithful service, they would receive Red Army food rations, which amounted to a generous ladle, twice daily, from a cauldron into which all appropriated food was thrown. The stew boiled twenty-four hours a day, a fatty broth of onions, roosters, rabbits, dead horse, turnips - whatever they happened on in the course of their collecting forays - the Red Army essentially lived off the countryside.Alan Furst
9
There were moments when Szara suspected that many idealists drawn to Communism were, at heart, people with an appetite for clandestine life.Alan Furst
10
I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.Alan Furst
11
We're the roughest people in the way we play and live, and that is because Americans come from people who all got up one morning and went 5, 000 miles, and that was a time in the 19th century when it wasn't so easy to do.Alan Furst
12
For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.Alan Furst
13
Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.Alan Furst