The Ghost
Robert Harris
Top 10 Best Quotes
“To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.”
“In the absence of genius there is always craftsmanship.”
“A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will therefore open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.”
“This is the trouble with internet research, in my experience. The proportion of what’s useful to what’s dross dwindles very quickly, and suddenly it’s like searching for something dropped down the back of a sofa and coming up with handfuls of old coins, buttons, fluff, and sucked sweets. What’s important is to ask the right question, and”
“I mean, take for instance all this civil liberties crap. You know what I’d do if I were in power again? I’d say, okay then, we’ll have two queues at the airports. On the left, we’ll have queues to flights on which we’ve done no background checks on the passengers, no profiling, no biometric data, nothing that infringed anyone’s precious civil liberties, used no intelligence obtained under torture—nothing. On the right, we’ll have queues to the flights where we’ve done everything possible to make them safe for passengers. Then people can make their own minds up which plane they want to catch. Wouldn’t that be great? To sit back and watch which queue the Rycarts of this world would really choose to put their kids on, if the chips were down?”
“Everybody tends to heighten his own reality. We start with a private fantasy about our lives and perhaps one day, for fun, we turn it into an anecdote. No harm is done. Over the years, the anecdote is repeated so regularly it becomes accepted as a fact. Quite soon, to contradict this fact would be embarrassing. In time, we probably come to believe it was true all along. And by these slow accretions of myth, like a coral reef, the historical record takes shape.”
“You're married? I notice you're not wearing a ring.' 'I can't, sadly. It's far too large. It bleeps when I go through airport security'.”
“You may object that this was corny, but don't forget that (a) corn sells by the ton, (b) that I only had two weeks to rework an entire manuscript, and (c) that it sure a hell was a lot better than starting with the derivation of the name Lang.”
“She was my—? I never knew what to call her. To say she was my girlfriend was absurd; no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend. Partner wasn’t right either, as we didn’t live under the same roof. Lover? How could one keep a straight face? Mistress? Do me a favor. Fiancée? Certainly not. I suppose I ought to have realized it was ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.”
“People who succeed in life are rarely reflective. Their gaze is always on the future: that’s why they succeed.”
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Book Keywords:
humor, ghostwriting, human-brain, intellectual-challenge, down-to-earth, fact, realistic-fiction, creative-writing, politics
