"City of Thieves" Quotes

Talent is a snare and a delusion. In the end, the practical questions about talent come down to these: Who cares? Who would know? And what difference would it make?

I had never understood the concept of loyalty. It was a luxury of the rich.

I wanted to ask how a man could be so unflinchingly brutal and then turn around and show such compassion.

We could have been good together, he said. We could have had a pretty good time.

War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.

I had always imagined that my life story, if and when I wrote it, would have a great first line: Unwilling to answer the door, he went upstairs to take a bath.

Some wars are unavoidable and need well be fought, but this doesn't erase warfare's waste. Sorry, we must say to the mothers whose sons will die horribly. This will never end. Sorry.

I am a coward. I am a coward who has been taught to write by a coward. I have never been to war. I have never been brave.

I was going to die here, in this place that was so far from my home, and no one would ever know what had become of me.

I was unprepared for the variety of ways in which a man can feel lonely.