“Tessa distinguished absolutely between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is journalistic pain. It’s diplomatic pain. It’s television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. Those who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it. They were the bad Samaritans.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Constant Gardener
“The most peaceble people will do the most terrible things when they're pushed.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Constant Gardener
“In a civilized country you can never tell.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Constant Gardener
“Why am I despising you when I'm about to change your life?”
― John le Carré, quote from The Constant Gardener
“You're history, Donohue. You think countries run the fucking world! Go back to fucking Sunday school. It's 'God save our multinational' they're singing these days.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Constant Gardener
“He sees passion in her gray eyes, and it scares him as all passion scares him, his own included.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Constant Gardener
“Pain observed is journalistic pain. It's diplomatic pain. It's television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Constant Gardener
“Arseholes who are expert at making something out of nothing [...] appeared equally capable of making nothing out of something”
― John le Carré, quote from The Constant Gardener
“more cruelly: he feared her faith because, as a fully paid-up pessimist, he knew he had none.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Constant Gardener
“Over them, in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Constant Gardener
“I do not betray the confidence of friends and I require you to respect that fact and admire me for it. Enormously and all the time. Where secrets are concerned, compared to me, the grave is a chatterbox”
― John le Carré, quote from The Constant Gardener
John le Carré
Born place: in Poole, Dorset, England, The United Kingdom
Born date October 19, 1931
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“Is death the greatest evil that can happen to anyone?”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“But somehow, standing in the clear night air, under a sky that glowed like a shower of sparks, none of that stuff mattered. It slipped off me. It was like shedding your clothes before you step in the shower. I felt I was down to essentials again. In fact I felt very close to God at that moment. I guess if you're ever going to feel close to God it'll be while you're looking at the heavens.”
― John Marsden, quote from The Night Is for Hunting
“It is one of the things she has come to love about America, the abundance of unreasonable hope.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from The Thing Around Your Neck
“Whatever you want to do, if you do it with all your heart, it will happen.”
― William Kamkwamba, quote from The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
“The baby boom eventually prompted Hubbard to order that no one could get pregnant without his permission; according to several Sea Org members, any woman disobeying his command would be "off-loaded" to another Scientology organization or flown to New York for an abortion.”
― Lawrence Wright, quote from Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
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Desecrating Solomon...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.
