How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Change the color of your hair, you change the face. Yes, there are traces of discoloration, brittleness, dye. Wear glasses and a mustache, you're a different man. I'd guess you were in your middle to late thirties, but you could be ten years older, or five younger." (1.79)
Washburn explains to anonymous dude (not yet Bourne) that he seems designed (literally, through plastic surgery) for deception. The only thing we know about him is that he seems to be preparing to pretend to be somebody else.
Quote #2
"I called a woman who's a member of our delegation; she loathes Bertinelli and was in her room. We've worked together for several years and we're friends. I told her that if she heard anything about me to disregard it, I was perfectly all right. As a matter of fact, if anyone asked about me, she was to say I was with a friend for the evening—for the night if pressed." (9.142)
Marie gets to lie, too. It's an especially good lie, too, because it's a lie within a lie. Marie's telling her friend to lie by saying she was with a man—and then if pressed, she could say the truth (that she's sleeping with him)—which is also actually a lie (since she's not sleeping with Bourne yet, anyway). Are you following this? Bourne's covert identity was also designed as a lie-within-a-lie: he was supposed to be Cain, who was supposed to be Bourne, even though in reality, he's Webb, not Cain or Bourne. The novel likes tricky lies. Never tell just one when you can tell two at once.
Quote #3
"Your type's everywhere, d'Amacourt. It's in your clothes, the way you wear your hair, even your walk; you strut too much. A man like you doesn't get to be the vice-president of the Valois Bank without asking questions; you cover yourself. You don't make a smelly move unless you can save your own ass." (12.50)
D'Amacourt is the utterly corrupt Paris bank official. Other folks in the novel make a pretense to honesty or goodness—even Carlos pretends to an honor-among-thieves morality. But d'Amacourt just wants money, money, money, and, as Bourne says, to save his own skin. In this novel of lies, there's a purity to his dishonesty that is almost refreshing. It's almost as if he is more honest than the "honest" characters.
Quote #4
"But we're not looking for a lie now, are we?" "No, we're looking for the truth. Don't be afraid of it, darling. I'm not." (12.187-188)
Bourne and Marie are looking for the truth, maybe—but looking for the truth also involves looking for lies, since Bourne is an identity largely built out of deceit. Moreover, it's the lies that make the search fun. If anonymous dude were just some boring non-lying regular Joe, we wouldn't have much of a book. So you could say the novel itself is, in some ways, actually afraid of the truth—or at least afraid of revealing it too soon, before the narrative has been spun out to manuscript length.
Quote #5
"I'm a chameleon, designed to fit a flexible mold." (14.36)
Bourne's called a "chameleon" because that sounds cooler and sexier than just calling him a liar. Is there a difference between being a "chameleon" and being a "liar"?
Quote #6
He was convinced the woman who walking beside him was the carrier of lethal commands that had been aborted by gunfire an hour ago, the order having been issued by a faceless man who demanded obedience or death. Yet there was not the slightest indication that a strand of her perfectly groomed hair had been disturbed by nervous fingers, no pallor on the chiseled mask that might be taken for fear. (14.106)
Jacqueline Lavier, the owner of the fashion house Les Classiques, is quite a liar herself. While Bourne's lying makes him awesome, and Carlos's lying makes him appealingly sinister, Lavier's lying makes her ugly: her face is referred to as a mask. Similarly, Madame Villiers's deception makes her a "whore" later on. In the novel, male liars are exciting and cool, but female liars are reviled. Is there any difference between the kinds of lies these people tell? If not, what accounts for the differing treatment of male and female liars?
Quote #7
"Carlos may be many things to many people, but among those who have benefited from his trust and generosity, there is loyalty. His informers and hirelings are not so readily for sale, although Cain has tried time and again." (17.181)
Lavier says that there is honor among thieves. Carlos has his own code and his own justice... supposedly. In fact, as the novel unfolds, Carlos systematically betrays pretty much all his minions, including Lavier herself. On a second read-through, this quote seems less like a defense of Carlos and more like a reiteration that he's a supervillain bad-guy liar.
Quote #8
"It goes deeper than lies, Jason," she said. "There's too much truth for lies alone." (18.135)
Marie is talking about the newspaper article that publicly implicates her in theft and murder. The article is mostly lies…but there are details about the bank which are true, and which are meant to send a message to Bourne to report to Treadstone. And there's something true about the newspaper's claim that Marie is a sort of criminal: she really is mixed up with some bad people these days.
Truth, here, is used to send a message—less to convey true information than to serve as its own code. Even truth can be a kind of lie. It's not that there's too much truth for lies, really; it's that the lies are so deep that even truth ends up as deception.
Quote #9
"The man called Jason Bourne," said Abbott..."is an American intelligence officer. There is no Cain, not the one Carlos believes. He's a lure, a trap for Carlos; that's who he is. Or was." (19.154)
So this is the truth. The irony is that Abbott, the creator of Treadstone, doesn't know if it's true anymore…and it is, in fact, not exactly true anymore: Bourne doesn't know that he's an intelligence officer, so he's kind of not an intelligence officer anymore. The truth has become a lie… which, in a way, makes the deception more perfect. Bourne is, after all, able to come close to completing his mission only after his mission stops being his mission. For spies, having the truth turn into a lie is maybe even better than knowing the truth in the first place.
Quote #10
"I'm not Cain because there is no Cain, there never was. Not the Cain they talk about. He never existed. A man from Medusa called Delta agreed to become a lie named Cain. I'm that man." (31.3)
More truth as we get closer to the end. And this is doubly true. Cain is a lie not only because he's a lie in the book, but also because he (like all the characters) is a fiction. The novel, as it winds down, tells you more and more emphatically that it's made up—it shows you how all the pieces were put in place, so you can admire the complicated craftsmanship of deceit.