Mccarry Quotes & Sayings

Espionage and counterespionage go together like horse and carriage. — Charles McCarry

Although it was hard to tell, with bluegrass, wether or not they were supposed to sound like geese. — Sarah McCarry

I've certainly written a lot of things that have more or less come true. But I don't have a gift for prophecy. — Charles McCarry

I have to tell you, I'm a happy man. I've lived the life I wanted to live. I've written the books I wanted to write. No publisher has ever even suggested that I change so much as a phrase - commas and periods, yes - and I suspect that I have a lot of serious readers; in fact, I know. — Charles McCarry

Here is my life, this life I never knew I could have, here is the whole world waiting for me, all the possible things. My future is as big as the wild night, the wine-dark sea. — Sarah McCarry

I've always been baffled by critics of the CIA, who are horrified that it does illegal things. That is the purpose of an intelligence service: to perform illegal acts. — Charles McCarry

Richard M. Helms, the first director of Central Intelligence to rise from the ranks, was fond of saying that the CIA had been founded to make sure that there would never be another Pearl Harbor. Underlying this mission impossible was the wishful supposition that an America that knew everything could prevent anything. — Charles McCarry

(F)iction is...what ought to have been, not what actually was. At least, not exactly. — Charles McCarry

You're a fairy princess beaming at me, remaking the world in your image. Wiping away everything that hurts. But someday everything that hurts will come back and kill you. — Sarah McCarry

Does he touch her the way he touched me. * — Sarah McCarry

...and I was reminded....of the everday boredom of a life in espionage. One is always waiting for someone who does not show up,for something that does not happen. — Charles McCarry

It will take you long, lonely years, but one day you will grow tired. Tired of boys, tired of contempt, and then where will you be? All these girls around you with their stories and their lives, the solace of one another, and you will be as far away from them as an anthropologist among a foreign people, curious but unable to make contact. Have faith: you will learn. — Sarah McCarry

The hard way is my favorite way to learn. — Sarah McCarry

I'm a chalkboard that's been erased over and over again until there's nothing left but a haze of white dust. Before this I never understood how long an hour could take, how many ticks of the second hand are in a minute, how endless the space between seconds can be. — Sarah McCarry

the truth was that I had become a secret agent because I could not bear for another minute the pointlessness of life in the real world. — Charles McCarry

When it comes to the assignment of blame, the CIA has by and large been a luckless organization. — Charles McCarry

If I were to give you a list of names of the people, world political figures, who have been assisted by the CIA, and even assisted to office around the world, you'd be astonished and probably wouldn't believe it. But it's very long, and the names are very distinguished. — Charles McCarry

You are not like other girls. You are not like other girls ("You are not like other girls," the boys you run with will tell you, and you will try not to let them see you preen under the glancing light of their approval). You learn their books and their language. You laugh at their jokes. You listen to their stories, sit blank-eyed on their couched while they play video games, pass them your English notes. You keep their secrets. You use the words they use about other girls in order to assure yourself that they will never use those words about you. You make yourself into nothingness, a ghost conjured into being only through the desires of boys, the rules of boys, the ideas of boys. You're not like other girls. — Sarah McCarry

I've consciously tried not to romanticize anything, especially not intelligence work. I've always said that I've been writing a series of episodic, naturalistic novels. The people just happen to be spies, politicians, civil servants. — Charles McCarry

China, hidden and mysterious, has always interested me. — Charles McCarry

Other writers tell me about these bushel baskets delivered at the front door. If I've gotten 50 letters over the last 18 years, I'd be surprised. — Charles McCarry

All the cells in my body rearrange, compass needles pointing to his north. — Sarah McCarry

Charles McCarry is the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue - by the breadth of Alan Furst, by the fathom of Eric Ambler, by any measure. — P. J. O'Rourke

I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer. — Charles McCarry

It's spring giving way to summer, balmy air smelling of roses, hot skin meeting the cold shock of the ocean, starry nights as warm as kisses. — Sarah McCarry

How can someone be so close to you and then so far away in the span of a single movement? — Sarah McCarry

grass-fed recommended ¼ cups boiling water 13.5-ounce can full-fat coconut milk 2 cups unsweetened almond milk ½ cup maple syrup, grade B recommended 4 large egg yolks 1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract 1 teaspoon hazelnut or almond extract (optional) 4-6 pieces Bacon (see here), crispy and diced into small pieces ½ cup fresh or dried Medjool dates, diced very small (optional) ½ cup dark chocolate chips (optional) — Matthew McCarry

What exactly was the role of the U.S. government in the coup that overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem?" Trumbull stared for a moment at Foley's rigid back. Then he said to Patchen, "Tell him." "I think you already know, Paul," Patchen said. "In simple terms, we countenanced it. We knew it was being planned. We offered advice. We provided support. We encouraged the plot. We welcomed the results. — Charles McCarry

Writing has taught me a lot - though far from everything - about writing, so as time has passed, it has become more pleasurable if not easier. I've done other things in life, but writing is by a factor of 10 the most difficult among them. And, of course, you never achieve what you set out to achieve, so you must keep on trying to do better. — Charles McCarry

I think it is best to know what you are and make peace with it. — Sarah McCarry

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one. — Charles McCarry

People are dying to tell you their secrets; it's just a matter of getting the conversation going in the right direction. If you just let people fill the silence, they will let you the most extraordinary things. I sometimes wonder if afterward they remember what they've said. — Charles McCarry

As an old man who remembers the intellectual exhilaration and the pleasure of having done good work that characterized the CIA when it was young, I wonder if it might not be better to speak and think in terms of restoring its culture. — Charles McCarry

Kissing him is like falling into a river, some great fierce current carrying me outside of my body, and all around us the music of the water rises and rises, and I can hear the wind moving over the sand, the distant singing of the stars veiled behind their curtain of blue sky, the slow, resonant chords of the earth turning on its axis. — Sarah McCarry

Writing for me is not a premeditated act. It just happens - characters keep coming out of nowhere and doing things I never expected them to do. The most persistent and most productive of these has been Paul Christopher, whom I didn't expect to see again after he appeared in 'The Miernik Dossier.' — Charles McCarry

No wonder the summer solstice had been such a fun day in northern Europe before Christian missionaries arrived from the sunny south. If priests had not driven sex underground, what would the north have been like? Would art have flourished in the absence of sexual repression? What about artillery and fortification? The Reformation? The Thirty Years War? The French Revolution? The final perfection of murder as blood sport at Verdun and Dresden and in the Gulag?

In short, where would we be without Jesus? — Charles McCarry

Suddenly, in the here and now, everything depended on the houbara bustard. — Charles McCarry

You think that the world we live in is ordinary. We make noise and static to fill the empty spaces where ghosts live. We let other people grow our food, bleach our clothes. We seal ourselves in, clean the dirt from our skins, eat of animals whose blood does not stain our hands. We long ago left the ways of our ancestors, oracles and blood sacrifice, traffic with the spirit world, listening for the voices out of stones and trees. But maybe sometimes you have felt the uncanny, alone at night in a dark wood, or waiting by the edge of the ocean for the tide to come in. We have paved over the ancient world, but that does not mean we have erased it. — Sarah McCarry

Whatever is happening here, it definitely bypassed go and went straight to really fucking weird without collecting two hundred dollars. — Sarah McCarry

There's nothing new about European anti-Americanism. To go to a dinner party of intellectuals in Paris in 1960 was like walking into a tiger's den with a piece of raw meat in your hands. — Charles McCarry

When the music stops the hole inside me is so huge I think I might die from it. Without — Sarah McCarry

All suburban housing developments look alike, and besides, every Yankee who ever crossed the Potomac except Ulysses S. Grant got lost as soon as he reached the Virginia side. — Charles McCarry

I cannot grasp the difference between killing people with drones or rifles and knives. The objective in war is to kill the enemy before he kills you. I can't fathom the almost religious zeal with which the use of drones is being opposed. — Charles McCarry

Anything that's secret, clandestine, loaded with such a supercargo of speculation, misinformation, disinformation and, for that matter, accurate revelations, creates an appetite. — Charles McCarry

I was swimming in my swimming pool when 'The Secret Lovers' popped entire into my head. I got out, dried off, went upstairs, and finished the book in about 50 days. — Charles McCarry

Who among us has not wanted to be transformed? I had lived all my life surrounded by extraordinary people, and some nights I would fall asleep wishing to wake up worthy of them. — Sarah McCarry

I write in a very peculiar way. I think about a book for 25 or 30 years in a kind of inchoate way, and at one point or another, I realize the book is ready to be written. I usually have a character, a first line, and general idea of what the book is going to be about. — Charles McCarry