Quotes from The Constant Gardener

John le Carré ·  496 pages

Rating: (17.6K votes)


“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


About the author

John le Carré
Born place: in Poole, Dorset, England, The United Kingdom
Born date October 19, 1931
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