“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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“What she had begun to learn was the weight of liberty. Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Tombs of Atuan
“To be able to shit on people before they get a chance to shit on you. That's power.”
― Sister Souljah, quote from The Coldest Winter Ever
“Scars speak more loudly than the sword that caused them.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Manuscript Found in Accra
“she’d only looked at him for a second before she’d walked out of the woods, Jenny had registered the odd light in his eyes and”
― Judith McNaught, quote from A Kingdom of Dreams
“Waste not, want not’ is the Engineers’ motto, Miss. Properly processed human ordure makes very useful fuel for our city’s engines. And we are experimenting with ways of turning it into a tasty and nutritious snack. We feed our prisoners on nothing else. Unfortunately they keep dying. But that is just a temporary setback, I’m sure.”
― Philip Reeve, quote from Mortal Engines
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Orb Sceptre ThroneBookQuoters 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.
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