The Constant Gardener

Tessa distinguished absolutely between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is journalistic pain. It’s diplomatic pain. It’s television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. Those who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it. They were the bad Samaritans.

The most peaceble people will do the most terrible things when they're pushed.

In a civilized country you can never tell.

Why am I despising you when I'm about to change your life?

You're history, Donohue. You think countries run the fucking world! Go back to fucking Sunday school. It's 'God save our multinational' they're singing these days.

He sees passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included.

Pain observed is journalistic pain. It's diplomatic pain. It's television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set.

Arseholes who are expert at making something out of nothing [...] appeared equally capable of making nothing out of something

more cruelly: he feared her faith because, as a fully paid-up pessimist, he knew he had none.

Over them, in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note.

I do not betray the confidence of friends and I require you to respect that fact and admire me for it. Enormously and all the time. Where secrets are concerned, compared to me, the grave is a chatterbox