Stephen Hunter

Stephen Hunter (born March 25, 1946) is an American novelist, essayist, and film critic.

Quotes

Basil's War (2021)

All page numbers are from the hardcover first edition, published by Mysterious Press, ISBN 978-1-61316-224-8, first printing

The chapters in the book are not numbered. Italics as in the book. Bold face added for emphasis.

• “You do not have the hero influenza. It’s so refreshing when all are rushing about, some few because they want to but the more general because they have to, or be thought a slacker.”
  “I love king and country,” said Basil, “but I do love Basil more. Someone has to survive to help out postwar.”
  • p. 3

• It somehow caught enough illumination from the stars to gleam a bit, though without romance or beauty. It simply reminded him of unpleasant things and his aversion to large bodies of the stuff, which to him had but three effects: it made one wet, it made one cold, or it made one dead. All three were to be avoided.
  • p. 11

• It was the sort of organization that would have welcomed Jack the Ripper to its ranks, possibly even promoted, certainly decorated, him. It existed primarily to destroy—people, places, things, anything that could be destroyed. Whether all this was just mischief for the otherwise unemployable or long-term strategic wisdom was as yet undetermined. It was up for considerable debate among the other intelligence agencies.
  • p. 18

• “All right then, perhaps drop me in a river from a low altitude?”
  “Sir, you’d hit the water at over one hundred miles per hour and bounce like a billiard ball off the bumper. Every bone would shatter.”
  “That won’t do. I suppose then it’s the parachute?”
  “Yes, sir. Have you had training?”
  “Scheduled several times, but I always managed to come up with an excuse. I could see no sane reason for abandoning a perfectly fine airplane in flight. That was then, however, and now, alas, is now.
  • pp. 23-24

• I doubt I’ll be allowed to make the trip. The path to Jesus would include sobriety, a clean mind, obedience to all commandments, a positive outlook, respect for elders, regular worship, and a high level of hygiene. I am happily guilty of none of those.
  • p. 29

• The Germans loved the cheese, the meals, the whores, the sights, and all the pleasures of France, it is true, but they enjoyed one thing even more robustly: that it was Not Russia.
  This sense of Not-Russia made each day a joy. The fact that at any moment they could be sent to Russia haunted them and drove them to new heights of sybaritic release. Each pleasure had a melancholy poignance in that he who experienced it might shortly be slamming 8.8 cm shells into the breach of an anti-tank gun as fleets of T-34s poured torrentially out of the snow at them, this drama occurring at 25 degrees below zero on the outskirts of a town they never heard of, could not pronounce, and that offered no running water, pretty women, or decent alcohol.
  • p. 35

• However, Basil had a sound operational principle, which now served him well. Most bad things don’t happen. What happens is that in its banal, boring way, reality bumbles along.
  The worst thing one can do is panic. Panic betrays more agents than traitors. Panic is the true enemy.
  • pp. 42-43

• “I hope I’m smart enough to stay up with all these wrinkles, gentlemen. I already have a headache.”
  “Welcome to the world of espionage,” said Sir Colin. “We all have headaches.”
  • p. 48

• “He has made himself useful to his masters for many years as a ‘talent spotter,’ that is, a man who looks at promising undergraduates, picks those with sound nerves, keen policy minds, and good connections, forecasts their rise, and woos them to his side as secret agents with all kinds of bubbly of the sort that appeals to the mushy romantic brain of the typical English high-born idiot.”
  • p. 48

• “We could never find the packaging to catch the imagination of the British gentleman, to say nothing of a slogan. German as a language does not lend itself to slogans. Our attempt at slogans were ludicrous. We are too serious and our language is like potatoes and gravy. It has no lightness in it at all. The best we could come up with was ‘Our tonic is very good.’ Thus, we give the world Nietzsche and not Wodehouse.”
  • pp. 55-56

• They were, mostly, just cops. And they brought cop attributes to their new headquarters: dyspepsia, too much smoking, cheap suits, fallen feet, a deep cynicism about everything but particularly human nature, and even more particularly notions of “honor,” “justice,” or “duty.” They did believe passionately in one cause, however: staying out of Russia.
  • pp. 58-59

• They love to cooperate with the Brits because the Brits give them so much equipment which can either be sold on the black market or used against their domestic enemies after the war. So, they will always jump lively for the SOE, because the loot is too good to turn down.
  • pp. 60-61

• “Have I been misinformed?” asked Basil. “Are we at war with the Russians? I thought they were our friends.”
  “I wish it were as easy as that,” said Sir Colin. “But it never is. Yes, in one sense we are at war with Germany and at peace with Russia. On the other hand, this fellow Stalin is a cunning old brute, stinking of bloody murder to high heavens, and thus he presumes that all are replicas of himself, equally cynical and vicious. While we are friends with him at a certain level, he still spies on us at another level. And, because we know him to be a monster, we still spy on him. It’s all different compartments. Sometimes it’s damned hard to keep straight, but one thing all the people in this room agree on: the moment the rope snaps hard about Herr Hitler’s chicken neck, the next war begins, and it is between we of the West and they of the East.”
  “Rather dispiriting,” said Basil. “One would have thought one had accomplished something, other than clearing the stage for the next go-round.”
  “So it goes in our sad world.”
  • pp. 65-66

• “Basil, as a man of action you desire action. But that could only occur in a world where things are clear and simple,” said Sir Colin. “Such a planet does not exist. On this one, the real one, direct action is almost always impossible. One must move on the oblique, making concessions and allowances all the way, never giving up too much for too little, tracking reverberations and rebounds, keeping the upper lip as stiff as if embalmed in concrete.”
  • pp. 91-92

• Kavandish, the Army muckity-muck, had a face that showed every emotion from A all the way to A-. It was a mask of meat shaped in an infantry square such as those at Waterloo and built bluntly around two ball bearings, empty of light, wisdom, empathy, or kindness, only registering force.
  • p. 93

• He preferred more direct approaches, such as to hang around in the Left Bank hotel where Macht had set up his headquarters and threaten in a loud voice to send them all to Russia if they didn’t produce the enemy agent quickly. The Abwehr men took to calling him the Black Pigeon behind his back, for it took into account his pigeon-like strut, breast puffed, dignity formidable, self-importance manifest, while accomplishing nothing tangible whatsoever except to leave small piles of shit wherever he went.
  • p. 119

• The whole expressed the complexity, the difficulty, the arrogance, the insolence, the ego, the whole je ne sais quoi of the French, their smug, prosperous country, their easy treachery, their utter lack of conscience, their powerful sense of entitlement.
  • p. 132

• Libraries are the font of civilization, do you not agree?
  • p. 157

• He hardly knew his mother, he hated his father, the brothers were all older than he was and had formed their friendships and allegiances already. Women that he had been intimate with arrived to mind, but they did not bring issues of pride and triumph, only memories of human fallibility and disappointment, theirs and his, and his congenital inability to remain faithful to any of them, love or not, always revealed its ugliness.
  • p. 202

• He loved the dirt, the sun, the intricacy of the chemistry and intuition that lay behind the glamor of the vineyard. It was hard, hard work, physically—he dug, he picked, he strained with his workers, he nursed the fermentation with his presence like a father over his newborn. At night, he studied relentlessly; he had for once in his silly life cared about something. If you want truth, look for it in the dirt. The dirt never lies. It may betray you with a bad harvest, but it’s not personal. It’s just dirt.
  • pp. 202-203

• That is the way of the wickedness called war. It eats us all. In the end, it and it alone is the victor, no matter what the lie called history says. The god of War, Mars the Magnificent and Tragic, always wins.
  • p. 203