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

Every man has his personal devil waiting for him somewhere.

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

There were times when he confronted his own image as a man confronts an empty valley, and the vision propelled him forward again to experience as despair compels us to extinction. Sometimes he was like a man in flight, but running toward the enemy, desperate to feel upon his vanishing body the blows that would prove his being; desperate to imprint upon his sad conformity the mark of real purpose, desperate perhaps, as Leclerc had hinted, to abdicate his conscience in order to discover God.