“Back when I was a callow youth, if I had known how miserable the hours would be working for the CIA, I would have just told that recruiter to send me in prison instead.”

“Oh, I take your meaning now, Marcus,” he said, as if comprehension had just dawned. “You would have me harken back to a time when the outcome of a contest was not known until after the voting. How nostalgic.”

“I thought suddenly Look. If Kambei had stopped recruiting when the first samurai didn’t work out a 205-minute masterpiece of modern cinema would have been over at minute 32.”

“I never meant to hurt you, Isabel. Had I known what I would find when I came north, I would never have agreed to Leighton's request... That is a lie. Had I known that I would find you when I came north, I would have come years ago.”

“In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.”

“I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.”