“But I am greedy for life. I do too much of everything all the time. Suddenly one day my heart will fail. The Iron Crab will get me as it got my father. But I am not afraid of The Crab. At least I shall have died from an honourable disease. Perhaps they will put on my tombstone. 'This Man Died from Living Too Much'.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“Hope makes a good breakfast. Eat plenty of it.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“For her, sex was nothing more than an itch. And this phsychological and physiological neutrality of hers at once relieved her of so many human emotions and sentiments and desires. Sexual neutrality was the essence of coldness in an individual. It was a great and wonderful thing to be born with.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“Just as, at least in one religion, accidia is the first of the cardinal sins, so bordom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“Danger, like a third man, was standing in the room.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“The great trains are going out all over Europe, one by one, but still, three times a week, the Orient Express thunders superbly over the 1,400 miles of glittering steel track between Istanbul and Paris.
Under the arc-lights, the long-chassied German locomotive panted quietly with the labored breath of a dragon dying of asthma. Each heavy breath seemed certain to be the last. Then came another.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“In his particular line of business, peace had reigned for nearly a year. And peace was killing him.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“Once a King, always a King. But once a Knight is enough!”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“It should have been the Arabian Nights, but to Bond, seeing it first above the tops of trams and above the great scars of modern advertising along the river frontage, it seemed a once beautiful theatre-set that modern Turkey had thrown aside in favour of the steel and concrete flat-iron of the Istanbul-Hilton Hotel, blankly glittering behind him on the heights of Pera.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“It was tied with a Windsor knot. Bond mistrusted anyone who tied his tie with a Windsor knot. It showed too much vanity. It was often the mark of a cad. Bond decided to forget his prejudice.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“For, or so they whispered, she would take the camp-stool and draw it up close below the face of the man or woman that hung down over the edge of the interrogation table. Then she would squat down on the stool and and look into the face and quietly say 'No. 1' or 'No. 10' or 'No. 25' and the inquisitors would know what she meant and they would begin. And she would watch the eyes in the face a few inches away from hers and breathe in the screams as if they were perfume.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“Clusters of bats hung like bunches of withered grapes from the roof and when, from time to time, either Kerim's head or Bond's brushed against them, they exploded twittering into the darkness.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“The double 0 numerals signify an agent who has killed and who is privileged to kill on active service.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“In the centre of Bond was a hurricane-room, the kind of citadel found in old-fashioned houses in the tropics. These rooms are small, strongly built cells in the heart of the house, in the middle of the ground floor and sometimes dug down into its foundations. To this cell the owner and his family retire if the storm threatens to destroy the house, and they stay there until the danger is past. Bond went to his hurricane room only when the situation was beyond his control and no other possible action could be taken. Now he retired to this citadel, closed his mind to the hell of noise and violent movement, and focused on a single stitch in the back of the seat in front of him, waiting with slackened nerves for whatever fate had decided for B. E. A. Flight No. 130.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“Even the highest tree has an axe waiting at its foot.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“I don’t care the hell what other people eat so long as they enjoy it. I can’t stand sad eaters and sad drinkers.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“Breakfast was Bond’s favourite meal of the day. When he was stationed in London it was always the same. It consisted of very strong coffee, from De Bry in New Oxford Street, brewed in an American Chemex, of which he drank two large cups, black and without sugar. The single egg, in the dark blue egg-cup with a gold ring round the top, was boiled for three and a third minutes. It was a very fresh, speckled brown egg from French Marans hens owned by some friend of May in the country. (Bond disliked white eggs and, faddish as he was in many small things, it amused him to maintain that there was such a thing as the perfect boiled egg.) Then there were two thick slices of wholewheat toast, a large pat of deep yellow Jersey butter and three squat glass jars containing Tiptree ‘Little Scarlet’ strawberry jam; Cooper’s Vintage Oxford marmalade and Norwegian Heather Honey from Fortnum’s. The coffee pot and the silver on the tray were Queen Anne, and the china was Minton, of the same dark blue and gold and white as the egg-cup.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“Bond mistrusted anyone who tied his tie with a Windsor knot. It showed too much vanity.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“Out of the mouth of the huge, shadowed poster, between the great violet lips, half-open in ecstasy, the dark shape of a man emerged and hung down like a worm from the mouth of a corpse.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“Bond sat down and looked across into the tranquil, lined sailor’s face that he loved, honoured and obeyed.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“Certainly, Effendi,’ the man bowed Bond to the lift. ‘But alas the plumbers are in your former room. The water supply . . .’ the voice trailed away. The lift rose about ten feet and stopped at the first floor. Well, the story of the plumbers makes sense, reflected Bond. And, after all, there was no harm in having the best room in the hotel.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“Bond again walked round the room. This time he carefully inspected the walls and the neighbourhood of the bed and the telephone. Why not take the room? Why would there be microphones or secret doors? What would be the point of them?”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“Quickly she opened them again. He might have noticed. But the eyes gazed blankly up at the sky. Now–she reached for the oil–to do the face. The girl’s thumbs had scarcely pressed into the sockets of the man’s closed eyes when the telephone in the house started ringing. The sound reached impatiently out into the quiet garden. At once the man was up on one knee like a runner waiting for the gun. But he didn’t move forward. The ringing stopped. There was the mutter of a voice. The girl could not hear”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“And what an honour to have been chosen. How silly to have been so frightened! Naturally the great leaders of the State would not allow harm to come to an innocent citizen who worked hard and had no black marks on her zapiska. Suddenly she felt immensely grateful to the father-figure that was the State, and proud that she would now have a chance to repay some of her debt. Even the Klebb woman wasn’t really so bad after all.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
“He asked nothing better than to kill an Englishman. He had accounts to settle with the bastards.”
― Ian Fleming, quote from From Russia With Love
Ian Fleming
Born place: in Mayfair, London, England
Born date May 28, 1908
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“She looks sad. She looks angry. She looks different from everyone else I know—she cannot put on that happy face others wear when they know they are being watched. She doesn’t put on a face for me, which makes me trust her somehow.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from The Silver Linings Playbook
“Tom is a filthy little pustule. If you quote me, I'll deny it!”
― Nancy Farmer, quote from The House of the Scorpion
“She turned; she bruised under her heel the scaly head of this dark suspicion-as terrifying to her as his guilt was to him. 'O Absalom, my Absalom! Come, come, we will not entertain such a thought. God himself would not urge it upon a mother.”
― Theodore Dreiser, quote from An American Tragedy
“We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, quote from Three Men in a Boat
“Some things you got to release. Gary said. The more you hold them in, the worse you get. When you release them, they got to go somewhere else. The Bible says He can carry all that burden.”
― Rebecca Skloot, quote from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
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