Robert Ludlum Quotes

You appear to be a mass of contradictions," Dr Washburn said. "There's a subsurface violence almost always in control, but very much alive. There's also a pensiveness that seems painful for you, yet you rarely give vent to the anger that pain must provoke.

I see things and I hear things I do not understand. I'm a skilled, resourceful ... vegetable!

It was important to keep moving. Certain struggles continued. Others had to be brought to a close. The wisdom was in deciding which.

Bourne concentrated on rest and mobility. From somewhere in his forgotten past he understood that recovery depended upon both and he applied rigid discipline to both.

When the old men kill themselves, the cities are dying.

She's an old soldier's woman, and she has antennae for things that often escape the officer in the field.

Characterization is integral to the theatrical experience.

For so many, death is a liberation from intolerable human conditions.

He was a relieved man; he was an angry man.

Better the devil you can live with than one you don't know.

I fought ... I fought and I fought ... until I ... couldn't remember any more.

Perhaps conscience did not always produce cowards. Sometimes it made a man feel better about himself.

They never listened until it was too late, and then only with stern forbearance and strong reminders of what might have been - had things been as they were perceived to be, which they were not.

I get annoyed when a self-indulgent writer just shows off what he knows but doesn't really tell a story. To me storytelling is first a craft. Then if you're lucky, it becomes an art form. But first, it's got to be a craft.. You've got to have a beginning, middle and end. And I have sort of applied the theatrical principles to writing. Throw the story in the air and see what's going to happen.

There was too little space for their own - and they guarded their own as all Chinese had done from the earliest dynasties.

Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta...Delta is for Charlie and Charlie is for Cain

I don't like your eyes. They belong on a dead fish.

It's an insoluble dilemma, really. Presidents change, different men with different temperaments and appetites sit in the Oval Office. However, a long-range intelligence strategy doesn't change, not one like this. Yet an offhand remark over a glass of whiskey in a postpresidential conversation, or an egotistical phrase in a memoir, can blow that same strategy right to hell. There isn't a day that we don't worry about those men who have survived the White House.

Sundown. The distressed sloop, its mainmast shattered by lightning, its sails ripped by the winds of the open sea, drifted into the small, quiet beach of a private island in the Lesser Antilles

Indiscriminate use among unintelligent leads to chaos.

Greater economic power will be in the hands of too few.

Credo quia absurdum – I believe because it is absurd.

Summer nights held a special kind of loneliness that gave rise to strange imaginings. One walked the beach alone and thought too much.

We're a couple of ciphers who got pushed around. We don't know what happened; just that we don't like it.

The end did not justify the means, but justifiable means that brought about a fair and necessary conclusion were not to be dismissed.

Hate and love are essentially the same in that the person who loves is as easily manipulated as a person who hates

There'll come a moment when you think you can make it, and you'll try.

Nothing is so convincing as someone who's a bewildered injured party and lets everybody know it.

It's called obfuscation in the interest of deniability. You might say it's our lingua franca.

A man's weaknesses may intrude on his faith but they do not diminish it.

Visions of one powerful scene after another parade across his inner screen, each exploding with drama and meaning

Learn always but never appear to be learning.

The easiest thing in the world is to convince yourself that you're right. As one grows old, it is easier still.

there was no television in the Netherlands during the afternoons!

He wasn't smart enough to see it, said Jason Bourne. He couldn't think geometrically.

Sleep is a weapon!

A corruption of intentions.

The cruelest thing you can do to a person who's living in panic is to offer him or her hope that turns out false. When the crash comes its intolerable.

Hope, perhaps the most dangerous of all emotions and perhaps the most necessary.

The mind plays tricks. It rejects things until it thinks ― or something tells it ― that the remembering can be handled.

Truth is neither joyful nor sad, neither good nor bad. It is simply truth.

Strangers should meet in unfamiliar areas. It's comforting.

The most precious jewels are not made of stone, but of flesh.

You know, Mr. Webb, you have two commands you use with irritating frequency. 'Move' and 'Let's go.

Accountants and economists are natural enemies. One views trees, the other forests, and the visions are usually at odds, as they should be.

They lived with the intensity of two people aware that change would come. And when it came, it would come quickly; so there were things to talk about which could not be avoided any longer.

Blessed are the flexible for they will not allow themselves to become bent out of shape!

I have always preferred conflict of individuals over the battle of extreme ideologies.

I didn't leave that crowd of ocelots to go back into it." [when asked to write the film script for The Osterman Weekend]

If I haven't done badly, it's because I've become indispensable to too many like David Abbott. I have in my head a thousand facts they couldn't possibly recall. It's simply easier for them to place me where the questions are, where problems need solutions. (Alfred Gillette)