The Tailor Of Panama Quotes

What that judge did is immoral. Here in Panama when we bribe somebody we expect loyalty.

And what’s life if it isn’t invention? Starting with inventing yourself.

Everything in the world is true if you invent it hard enough and love the person it’s for!

I always say South America’s the only place where you cut a gentleman his suit one week and see his statue wearing it the next.

...Arthur Braithwaite, known to Louisa and the children as God. And all right, strictly speaking Braithwaite did not exist. Why should he? Not every god has to exist in order to do his job.

And we dress, sir --?" he murmured, feeling Osnard's gaze burning the nape of his neck. "Most of my gentlemen seem to favour left these days. I don't think it's political." This was his standard joke, calculated to raise a laugh even with the most sedate of his customers. Not with Osnard apparently. "Never know where the bloody thing is. Bobs about like a windsock," he replied dismissively.

All right, Pendel had lied to him, if lying was the word. He had told Osnard what he wanted to hear and gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain it for him, including making it up. Some people lied because lying gave them a kick, made them feel braver or cleverer than all the lowly conformists who went on their bellies and told the truth. Not Pendel. Pendel lied to conform. To say the right things at all times, even if the right things were in one place, and the truth was in another.

Perhaps the single most enjoyable part of my researches, which covered a period of about four years, was meeting the artists themselves, the people who provide the luxuries. All of them, from tailors and boot makers to truffle hunters and champagne blenders, were happy in their work, generous with their time, and fascinating about their particular skills. To listen to a knowledgeable enthusiast, whether he's talking about a Panama hat or the delicate business of poaching foie gras in Sauternes, is a revelation, and I often came away wondering why the price wasn't higher for the talent and patience involved.

The embassy’s front door was of bulletproof steel lined with a veneer of English oak. You attained it by touching a button in a silent lift. The royal crest, in this air-conditioned stillness, suggested silicone and funeral parlours. The windows, like the doors, had been toughened to frustrate the Irish and tinted to frustrate the sun. Not a whisper of the real world penetrated. The silent traffic, cranes, shipping, old town and new town, the brigade of women in orange tunics gathering leaves along the central reservation of the Avenida Balboa, were mere specimens in Her Majesty’s inspection chamber. From the moment you set foot in British extraterritorial airspace, you were looking in, not out. —

All righ, Pendel had lied to him, if lying was the word. He had told Osnard what he wanted to hear and gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain it for him, including making it up. Some people lied because lying gave them a kick, made them feel braver or cleverer than all the lowly conformists who went on their bellies and told the truth. Not Pendel. Pendel lied to conform. To say the right things at all times, even if the right things were in one place, and the truth was in another.

..., it's a law. A man's got to pay for his own dreams.

When we can't hurt our enemies, we hurt our friends.

It was a different judge by then, Ramón. A new judge was appointed after the election and the bribe wasn't transferable from the old one to the new one, you see. Now the new judge is marking time to see which side comes up with the best offer. The clerk says the new judge has got more integrity than the old one, so naturally he's more expensive. Scruples are expensive in Panama, he says. And it's getting worse.

since nothing is more predictable than the media’s parroting of its own fictions and the terror of each competitor that it will be scooped by the others, whether or not the story is true, because

He wore a Panama hat, dark glasses with smoky round lenses and a gray suit that must have been tailored. I don’t know much about high fashion, I just know a good fit. The look reminded me of old Hollywood. Most men look silly to me in hats, but the effortless elegance of the tilt—the way it angled and contrasted with the level line of his shoulders—seemed totally organic. Like he could walk into a hurricane and come out the other side with his hat exactly the same angle.

It was a system of survival that Pendel had developed in prison and perfected in marriage, and its purpose was to provide a hostile world with whatever made it feel at ease with itself. To make it tolerable. To befriend it. To draw its sting.

Osnard proposed the National Trust. "Do you like old buildings?" the secretary asked, as if he feared that Osnard might blow them up. "Adore them. Total addict." "Quite so." With trembling fingertips, the secretary lifted a corner of a file and peered inside. "I suppose they might just take you. You're disreputable. Charm of a sort. Bilingual, if they like Spanish. Nothing lost by giving them a try, I dare say." "The National Trust?" "No, no. The spies. Here. Take this to a dark corner and fill it in with invisible ink.

Not that his enlistment was a forgone conclusion. This was the new slimline Service, free of the shackles of the past, classless in the great Tory tradition, with men and women democratically hand-picked from all walks of the white, privately educated, suburban classes. And Osnard was as hand-picked as the rest of them.

I wasn't there, it was two other blokes, she hit me first and it was with her consent, Your Honour.