Jeffrey Archer · 305 pages
Rating: (32.9K votes)
“Making a million legally has always been difficult. Making a million illegally has always been a little easier. Keeping a million when you have made it is perhaps the most difficult of all.”
“The bastard. It's bad enough knowing he's stolen our money,but it's humiliating having to watch him spend it.”
“It pains me to think how much you are worth now."
"I can't tell you that. If you can count it, you haven't got any.”
“How well they all knew each other now, he thought. In twelve weeks James felt he had come to know more about these three men than any of the so-called friends he'd known for twenty years. For the first time he understood why his father continually referred back to friendships formed during the war with men he normally would never have met. He realised how much he was going to miss Stephen when he returned to America. Success was, in fact, going to split them up.”
“One of the advantages of real worth is that menial tasks can always be left to someone else.”
“How about your plan?"
"Nothing. Useless. And now we have started on the others I seem to have less time to concentrate on my own."
"Why don't I seduce him?"
"Not a bad idea, but you'd have to be pretty special to get £100,000 out of him, when he can hang around outside the Hilton or Shepherd Market and get it for £30. If there's one thing we've learnt about that gentleman it's that he expects value for money. At £30 a night it would take you just under 15 years to repay my share, and I'm not sure the other three would be willing to wait that long. Infact I'm not sure they will wait another fifteen days.”
“Stop fussing, honey. It won't be the first time James has seen a man's stomach."
It's not the first time I've seen that one, thought James.”
“He had never understood the niceties of life and it was too late to start learning now.”
“Stevie, don't get cross, get even.”
“He was, in the words of H. H. Munro, a man whose looks made it possible for women to forgive any other trifling inadequacies.”
“It might have been preferable," Eddis admitted, dryly, "if you had thrown off your chains of bondage solely for love of me. It would certainly have been more flattering." Standing so near to him, she was looking up into his face and watching it closely. "I am willing to accept, however, that we are real people, not characters in a play. We do not, all of us, need to be throwing inkwells. If we are compatible with one another, is that not sufficient?"
"Were I a king in more than just name, it would be all, all I dreamed of," said Sounis, and it was Eddis who blushed.
"You wish to wait, then, until you are confirmed as Sounis?"
"If..."
"When," said Eddis, firmly.
"Yes," said Sounis, "then.”
“Not that traditional princess behavior was like Isabelle at all. Isabelle with her whip and boots and knives would chop anyone who tried to pen her up in a tower into pieces, build a bridge out of the remains, and walk carelessly to freedom, her hair looking fabulous the entire time.”
“Michael walked to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water. "You all right?"
I made my twin brother hate me.
I can't try out for basketball.
I gave my number to some girl who thinks I'm a thug.
Gabriel looked back at his textbook. "Yeah. Fine.”
“The more someone assures you that everything is okay, the more you can be assured that it's not.”
“Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for.”
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