Quotes from I Am Pilgrim

Terry Hayes ·  612 pages

Rating: (82.2K votes)


“nobody’s ever been arrested for a murder; they have only ever been arrested for not planning it properly.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“You can kill a thinker, but you can't kill the thought.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“If you take the final betrayal out of it,' he said, 'he was a fine agent - one of the best.'
I stared at him. 'That's one way of putting it,' I replied. 'If you take the bomb out of it, 6 August was probably a nice day in Hiroshima.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“The world doesn't change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim



“In war, the first casualty is truth.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“The driver thought I was crazy—but then his religion thinks stoning a woman to death for adultery is reasonable, so I figured we were about even.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“Computers don't lie, but liars can compute.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“Like people say—if you want to make God laugh, tell him you’ve got plans.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“if the shit is up to your neck—whatever you do, don’t make waves.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim



“Some people say that compassion is the purest form of love because it neither expects nor demands anything in return.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“People say love is weak, but they're wrong: love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things - patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And every kind of love - the epic and the small, the noble and the base - the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all. That was the lesson I learned that day, and I'll be forever grateful I did. Some years later, deep in the ruins called Theatre of Death, it salvaged everything.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“A writer called Robert Louis Stevenson once said that ‘sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke, and found that life was duty.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“We’ve got one huge advantage—people believe what they see in databases. They’ve never learned the most important rule of cyberspace—computers don’t lie but liars can compute.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim



“there was this book I'd read by somebody whose name I couldn't remember and he had this expression 'sorrow floats”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“The three agents were hard guys, the youngest of them in his twenties, a man whose IQ was so low I figured they had to water him twice a day.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“The interior of the arms dealer's private jet was so ugly it hurt my feelings as well as my eyeballs.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“you gonna curse the darkness or light a candle?”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“As a Turkish proverb says--it was going to be like digging a well with a needle.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim



“After all, education is a grab for a better future, no matter how impossible the prospect may seem at the time.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“We wanted a labour force, but human beings came.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“I knew he was lying – he was so full of shit that if I gave him an enema I could have fitted him in a shoebox.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“She knew, even in marriage, if you advanced too far to please the other person it let them edge away and you ended up always laughing and fighting and screwing on their territory. Sometimes you had to stand your ground and make them come to you—just to keep the equilibrium.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“A child without parents learns to survive: they work out early to mask what they feel and if the pain proves beyond bearing, to dig a cave in their head, and hide inside.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim



“so hot that the locals claimed a pervert was a man who preferred women to beer”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“I had got up in the morning and, by the time I was ready for bed, it was a different planet: the world doesn't change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“I was angry about injustice--about the uncaring way the world works. I knew a lot of ordinary people had died that day, not because of fire or falling masonry but because of their compassion. It was their desperate attempts to save other human being--often total strangers--that ended up costing them their own lives.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for—justice, decency, humanity—and I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had violated our nation’s deepest values in order to protect them. Lost in thought, I headed for the”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim


“NOT EVERYBODY KNOWS this – or cares probably – but the first law of forensic science is Locard’s Exchange Principle, and it says ‘Every contact between a perpetrator and a crime scene leaves a trace.”
― Terry Hayes, quote from I Am Pilgrim



About the author

Terry Hayes
Born place: in England, The United Kingdom
Born date October 8, 1951
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Popular quotes

“Shall I tell you why young men love war? . . . In peace, there are a hundred questions with a thousand answers! In war, there is only one question with one right answer. . . . Going to war makes you a man. It is emotionally exciting and morally restful.”
― Mary Doria Russell, quote from A Thread of Grace


“I looked down at my hands. They were folded neatly together on the table like they belonged to someone else, as if someone had left their gloves behind and I had arranged them ready for collection.”
― R.J. Ellory, quote from A Quiet Belief in Angels


“How long does it last?" Said the other customer, a man wearing a tan shirt with little straps that buttoned on top of the shoulders. He looked as if he were comparing all the pros and cons before shelling out $.99. You could see he thought he was pretty shrewd.
"It lasts for as long as you live," the manager said slowly. There was a second of silence while we all thought about that. The man in the tan shirt drew his head back, tucking his chin into his neck. His mind was working like a house on fire
"What about other people?" He asked. "The wife? The kids?"
"They can use your membership as long as you're alive," the manager said, making the distinction clear.
"Then what?" The man asked, louder. He was the type who said things like "you get what you pay for" and "there's one born every minute" and was considering every angle. He didn't want to get taken for a ride by his own death.
"That's all," the manager said, waving his hands, palms down, like a football referee ruling an extra point no good. "Then they'd have to join for themselves or forfeit the privileges."
"Well then, it makes sense," the man said, on top of the situation now, "for the youngest one to join. The one that's likely to live the longest."
"I can't argue with that," said the manager.
The man chewed his lip while he mentally reviewed his family. Who would go first. Who would survive the longest. He cast his eyes around to all the cassettes as if he'd see one that would answer his question. The woman had not gone away. She had brought along her signed agreement, the one that she paid $25 for.
"What is this accident waiver clause?" She asked the manager.
"Look," he said, now exhibiting his hands to show they were empty, nothing up his sleeve, "I live in the real world. I'm a small businessman, right? I have to protect my investment, don't I? What would happen if, and I'm not suggesting you'd do this, all right, but some people might, what would happen if you decided to watch one of my movies in the bathtub and a VCR you rented from me fell into the water?"
The woman retreated a step. This thought had clearly not occurred to her before.”
― Michael Dorris, quote from A Yellow Raft in Blue Water


“Raimon was amused to see that the countess Carenza grew more beautiful by the day: her expression has softened and the pouches under her eyes had disappeared. She carried herself confidently, secure in the knowledge that she was fascinating to one pair of eyes at least.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Sandman: Book of Dreams


“For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human.”
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