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.”
“8But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and t a thousand years as one day. 9 u The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise v as some count slowness, but w is patient toward you, [1] x not wishing that any should perish, but y that all should reach repentance. 10But z the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then a the heavens will pass away with a roar, and b the heavenly bodies [2] will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. [3] 11Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, c what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, 12 d waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and e the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! 13But according to his promise we are waiting for f new heavens and a new earth g in which righteousness dwells.”
“conclusions are a matter of extrapolated logic based on her best comprehension of the principles the universe has revealed to her.”
“Course, that didn’t mean luck didn’t exist. You either believed in that, or you believed in what those Vorin priests were always saying—that poor people was chosen to be poor, on account of them being too dumb to ask the Almighty to make them born with heaps of spheres.”
“Indeed, when Luther’s school-yard chum Hans Reinecke wrote to him of his father’s death, Luther wrote, “Seldom if ever have I despised death as much as I do now.” He said that it “has plunged me into deep sadness not only because he was my father but also because he loved me very much.” Even more, he says, “through him my creator has given me all that I am and have.”
“Love is no rose. It’s a goddamn weed that digs its roots in so deep, there’s no hope of getting it out.”
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