John le Carré Quotes

Guns have their own silence. It is the silence of the dead to come.

... in moments of crisis our thoughts do not run consecutively but rather sweep over us in waves or intuition and experience ...

He had the nerve not to drink in a University where you proved your manhood by being drunk most of your first year.

He sees passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included.

The monstrosity of this, reaching Smiley through a thickening wall of spiritual exhaustion, left him momentarily speechless.

"There's no way out," he announced with satisfaction, "and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won't go back in its bottle, the face-off is for ever, the embrace gets tighter and the toys cleverer with every generation, and there's no such thing for either side as enough security. Not for the main players, not for the nasty little newcomers who each year run themselves up a suitcase bomb and join the club. We get tired of believing that, because we're human. We may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away. It never will. Never, never, never."

"So, who'll save us then, Walt?" Barley asked. "You and Nedsky?"

"Vanity, if anything will, which I doubt," Walter retorted. "No leader wants to go down in history as the ass who destroyed his country in an afternoon. And funk, I suppose. Most of our gallant politicians do have a narcissistic objection to suicide, thank God."

Perhaps you have forgotten. That’s one of the great problems of our modern world, you know. Forgetting. The victim never forgets. Ask an Irishman what the English did to him in 1920 and he’ll tell you the day of the month and the time and the name of every man they killed. Ask an Iranian what the English did to him in 1953 and he’ll tell you. His child will tell you. His grandchild will tell you. And when he has one, his great-grandchild will tell you too. But ask an Englishman — ” He flung up his hands in mock ignorance. “If he ever knew, he has forgotten. ‘Move on!’ you tell us. ‘Move on! Forget what we’ve done to you. Tomorrow’s another day!’ But it isn’t, Mr. Brue.” He still had Brue’s hand. “Tomorrow was created yesterday, you see. That is the point I was making to you. And by the day before yesterday, too. To ignore history is to ignore the wolf at the door.

He hated to be alone, but people bored him. Being alone was like being tired, but unable to sleep.

Smiley was not opposed to social distinctions but he liked to make his own.

...what woman has ever stopped by a want of information? She felt. And despised him for not acting in accordance with her feelings.

George, you won,' said Guillam, as they walked slowly towards the car.

'Did I?' said Smiley. 'Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did.

Power sits uneasily on those one has grown up with. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Spy.

Sometimes she thought Alec was right — you believed in things because you needed to; what you believed in had no value of its own, no function. What did he say: “A dog scratches where it itches. Different dogs itch in different places.

When Schulmann talked, he fired off conflicting ideas like a spread of bullets, then waited to see which ones went home and which came back at him. The sidekick's voice followed like a stretcher-party, softly collecting up the dead. (...) Sound oil policy, sound economics, sound everything. Justice it isn't. (part I, chapter 1)

And from there, he wandered off into an argument with Friedrich Schiller's grandiose statement that human stupidity was what the gods fought in vain. Not so, in Toby's opinion, and no excuse for anybody, whether god or man. What the gods and all reasonable humans fought in vain wasn't stupidity at all. It was sheer, wanton, bloody indifference to anybody's interests but their own.