The Bourne Identity

I mean, we're all trying to find out who the hell we are, aren't we?

The success of any trap lies in its fundamental simplicity. The reverse trap by the nature of its single complication must be swift and simpler still.

What a man can't remember doesn't exist for him.

I see things and I hear things I do not understand. I'm a skilled, resourceful... vegetable!

The easiest thing in the world is to convince yourself that you're right. As one grows old, it is easier still.

You're on your own now. You are not helpless. You will find your way.

How gratifying to be there when arrogance collapses. How much more so to be the instrument. (Alfred Gillette)

There'll come a moment when you think you can make it, and you'll try.

Men and women walked casually about as they did on the main floor, every now and then stopping one another, exchanging pleasantries or scraps of relevantly irrelevant information. Gossip.

The easiest thing in the world is to convince yourself that you are right. As one grows older, this is easier still.

Before taking her into the library, my wife told me she was an old friend in a marriage crisis. A fatuous lie; at her age there are no crises left in marriage, only acceptance and extraction. (General Villiers)

I loathe him. He stands for everything I hate in Washington. The right schools, houses in Georgetown, farms in Virginia, quiet meetings at their clubs. They've got their tight little world and you don't break in--they run it all. The bastards. The superior, self-inflated gentry of Washington. They use other men's intellects, other men's work, wrapping it all into decisions bearing their imprimaturs. And if you're on the outside, you become part of that amorphous entity, a 'damn fine staff.' (Alfred Gillette)

If I haven't done badly, it's because I've become indispensable to too many like David Abbott. I have in my head a thousand facts they couldn't possibly recall. It's simply easier for them to place me where the questions are, where problems need solutions. (Alfred Gillette)

The silence lasted precisely five seconds, during which time eyes roamed other eyes, several throats were cleared, and no one moved in his chair. It was as if a decision were being reached without discussion: evasion was to be avoided. Congressman Efrem Walters, out of the hills of Tennessee by way of the Yale Law Review, was not to be dismissed with facile circumlocution that dealt with the esoterica of clandestine manipulations. Bullshit was out.

They lived with the intensity of two people aware that change would come. And when it came, it would come quickly; so there were things to talk about which could not be avoided any longer.

Accountants and economists are natural enemies. One views trees, the other forests, and the visions are usually at odds, as they should be.

You appear to be a mass of contradictions," Dr Washburn said. "There's a subsurface violence almost always in control, but very much alive. There's also a pensiveness that seems painful for you, yet you rarely give vent to the anger that pain must provoke.

She's an old soldier's woman, and she has antennae for things that often escape the officer in the field.

I mean, we’re all trying to find out who the hell we are, aren’t we?

They never listened until it was too late, and then only with stern forbearance and strong reminders of what might have been—had things been as they were perceived to be, which they were not.

everything we knew, everything we felt!’ ‘Not quite everything,’ he said, touching her cheek. ‘I’m Jason to you, Bourne to me, because that’s the name I was given, and have to use it because I don’t have any other. But it’s not mine.

Wealth is relative to the amount of time one has to enjoy it.

warmed by the cold sea around him.

One balks, then agrees, then balks again only to agree again; that is the way one learns things.

followed – even now at this moment.’ The one-time beggar