Spectre book trilogy popular lines: See the Kindle Highlights

In honor of today’s U.S. release date for Spectre, the latest James Bond film, Amazon is giving EW readers an exclusive look at some of the most popular lines from Ian Fleming’s book trilogy that inspired the movie.

The following lines are among Kindle’s most-highlighted for Thunderbolt, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and You Only Live Twice. Read below to get a taste of daring stunts, cocktails shaken, not stirred, and femme fatales before hitting the theater.

Thunderball

• “He had decided that fast and accurate communication lay, in a contracting world, at the very heart of power. Knowledge of the truth before the next man, in peace or war, lay, he thought, behind every correct decision in history and was the source of all great reputations.”
• “Wishful intelligence, the desire to please or reassure the recipient, was the most dangerous commodity in the whole realm of secret information.”
• “Women are often meticulous and safe drivers, but they are very seldom first-class.”
• “What’s the good of other people’s opinions? Animals don’t consult each other about other animals. They look and sniff and feel. In love and hate, and everything in between, those are the only tests that matter.”
• “‘It’s just that I’d rather die of drink than of thirst.”
• “It was a room-shaped room with furniture-shaped furniture, and dainty curtains.”
• “SPECTRE – The Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion.”
• “It’s really the best for men. It makes them awful, but at least they’re human like that. It’s when they get godlike one can’t stand them.’”
• “Bond loathed and despised tea, that flat, soft, time-wasting opium of the masses,”
• “attention from the road ahead and four women are more than doubly dangerous, for the driver not only has to hear, and see, what her companion is saying, but also, for women are like that, what the two behind are talking about.”

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

• “On the theory that worry is a dividend paid to disaster before it is due,”
• “When the odds are hopeless, when all seems to be lost, then is the time to be calm, to make a show of authority – at least of indifference.”
• “Too much money is the worst curse you can lay on anyone’s head. I have enough. Tracy has enough. It will be fun saving up to buy something we want but can’t quite afford. That is the only kind of money to have – not quite enough.’”
• ““The World is not Enough”. You do not wish to have the right to it?’”
• “‘You know that this can happen, my friend – to men and to women. They burn the heart out of themselves by living too greedily, and suddenly they examine their lives and see that they are worthless. They have had everything, eaten all the sweets of life at one great banquet, and there is nothing left.”
• “If there was one thing that set James Bond really moving in life, with the exception of gun-play, it was being passed at speed by a pretty girl; and it was his experience that girls who drove competitively like that were always pretty – and exciting.”
• “Bond suddenly thought, Hell! I’ll never find another girl like this one. She’s got everything I’ve looked for in a woman, She’s beautiful, in bed and out. She’s adventurous, brave, resourceful. She’s exciting always. She seems to love me.”
• “Today he was a grown-up, a man with years of dirty, dangerous memories – a spy.”
• “And that beautiful girl with the long fair hair at the big table, that is Ursula Andress, the film star. What a wonderful tan she has!”
• “he didn’t happen to like girls, film stars for instance, who were in any way public property. He liked private girls, girls he could discover himself and make his own.”

You Only Live Twice

• “‘You only live twice: Once when you are born And once when you look death in the face.’��
• “‘I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.’”
• “I’ve found that one must try and teach people that there’s no top limit to disaster – that, so long as breath remains in your body, you’ve got to accept the miseries of life. They will often seem infinite, insupportable. They are part of the human condition.”
• “No self-respecting man could get through the day without his battery of four-letter words to cope with the roughage of life and let off steam.”
• “The Oriental way of life is particularly attractive to the American who wishes to escape from a culture which, I am sure you will agree, has become, to say the least of it, more and more unattractive except to the lower grades of the human species to whom bad but plentiful food, shiny toys such as the automobile and the television, and the “quick buck”, often dishonestly earned, or earned in exchange for minimal labour or skills, are the summum bonum, if you will allow the sentimental echo from my Oxford education.’”
• “The state of your health, the state of the weather, the wonders of nature – these are things that rarely occupy the average man’s mind until he reaches the middle thirties. It is only on the threshold of middle-age that you don’t take them all for granted, just part of an unremarkable background to more urgent, more interesting things.”
• ““A reasonable number of fleas is good for a dog. Otherwise the dog forgets he is a dog.” ’”
• “Further, your governments have shown themselves successively incapable of ruling and have handed over effective control of the country to the trade unions, who appear to be dedicated to the principle of doing less and less work for more money.”
• “If his wife is with him, you will throttle her too. She is certainly involved in all this business, and anyway she is too ugly to live.”
• “The big worry had driven out the smaller ones, the greater fear the lesser.”