“Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.”
― John le Carré, quote from A Perfect Spy
“You could be the perfect spy. All you need is a cause.”
― John le Carré, quote from A Perfect Spy
“He was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment.”
― John le Carré, quote from A Perfect Spy
“A vida tem de ser paga. A vida é fazer-se o que tem de ser feito, mesmo que se morra por causa disso.”
― John le Carré, quote from A Perfect Spy
“Mas em diplomacia nada é duradouro, nada é absoluto e uma conspiração entre assassinos não é motivo para interromper o fluxo da conversa”
― John le Carré, quote from A Perfect Spy
“In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job.”
― John le Carré, quote from A Perfect Spy
“And what am I thinking? I am thinking that a man who cannot speak clearly cannot think clearly.”
― John le Carré, quote from A Perfect Spy
John le Carré
Born place: in Poole, Dorset, England, The United Kingdom
Born date October 19, 1931
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“The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to becomeerased as the years go by, but often they change, or even grow, by incorporating extraneous features. Judges know this very well: almost never do two eyewitnesses of the same event describe it in the same way and with the same words, even if the event is recent and if neither of them has a personal interest in distorting it.”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved
“Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seemed to have vanished completely.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
“The Han language resembles no other on this earth. While I had no trouble learning to speak Mongol, and to write with its alphabet, I never learned more than a rudimentary comprehension of Han. The Mongol speech is gruff and harsh, like its speakers, but it at least employs sounds not too different from those heard in our Western languages. The Han, by contrast, is a speech of staccato syllables, and they are sung rather than spoken. Evidently the Han throat is incapable of forming more than a very few of the sounds that other people make. The sound of r, for one, is quite beyond them. My name in their speech was always Mah-ko. And, having so very few noises to work with, the Han must sound them on different tones—high, mid, low, rising, falling—to make a sufficient variety for compiling a vocabulary. It is like this: suppose our Ambrosian plainsong Gloria in excelsis had that meaning of “glory in the highest” only when sung to its traditional up and down neumes, and, if the syllables were sung in different ups and downs, were to change its meaning utterly—to “darkness in the lowest” or “dishonor to the basest” or even “fish for the frying.”
― Gary Jennings, quote from The Journeyer
“That which we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.” At the time”
― Charles Martin, quote from When Crickets Cry
“it's blindingly awful and awfully satisfying all at the same time.”
― Courtney Summers, quote from Cracked Up to Be
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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
