“And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackens, that his life had consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order, and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“Every man has his personal devil waiting for him somewhere.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“I know their unstinted devotion to the free-market economy, provided it's their freedom and somebody else's economy.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“There is no one better than a good Englishman and no one worse than a bad one. I have observed you. I think you are a good one. Mr Pine, do you know Richard Roper?”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“Even his Englishness was a well-kept secret.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“The snow is still falling and the worst man in the world is drawn towards it like a man who is contemplating his childhood in the dancing flakes.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“There's no such thing as a decision. There never was. There's whether you've had a good day or a bad day, there's going forward because there's nothing behind and running because if you stand still any longer you'll fall over. There's movement or there's stagnation, there's the past that drives you and the regimental chaplain who preaches that only the obedient are free and the women who say you have no feelings, but they can't live without you.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“Promise to build a chap a house, he won't believe you. Threaten to burn his place down, he'll do what you tell him. Fact of life.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackness, that his life has consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“Guns have their own silence. It is the silence of the dead to come.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“Trouble with arms is, everyone thought they were recession-proof, but they’re not. Iran–Iraq was an arms dealers’ charter, and they thought it would never end. Since then it’s been downhill all the way. Too many manufacturers chasing too few wars. Too much loose hardware being dumped on the market. Too much peace about and not enough hard currency. Our Dicky did a bit of the Serbo-Croat thing, of course – Croats via Athens, Serbs via Poland – but the numbers weren’t in his league and there were too many dogs in the hunt. Cuba’s gone dead, so’s South Africa, they make their own. Ireland isn’t worth a light or he’d have done that too. Peru, he’s got a thing going there, supplying the Shining Path boys. And he’s been making a play for the Muslim insurgents in the Southern Philippines, but the North Koreans are in there ahead of him and I’ve a suspicion he’s going to get his nose bloodied again.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“Hotel’s full up, I’m afraid, Mr. Roper, Jonathan rehearsed in another last-ditch effort to fend off the inevitable. Herr Meister is desolated. A temporary clerk has made an unpardonable error. However, we have managed to obtain rooms for you at the Baur au Lac, et cetera.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“You give the air of looking for someone, Sophie had said. But I think the missing person is yourself. Each”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“When God finished putting together Dicky Roper, He took a deep breath and shuddered a bit, then He ran up our Jonathan to restore the ecological balance.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“It was him taught Idi Amin’s lads how to extract voluntary confessions with the aid of an electric cattle-prod. Our chum likes them English and he likes them with a dirty past. He”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“shoes and a leather jacket. When Burr had”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“band above her and calls to somebody she”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“Dining alone had always been his particular pleasure, and tonight, in deference to the war’s depletion, Maître Berri had promoted him from his single-seater by the service door to one of the high altars at the window.”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
“The pallor of his eyes caught you by surprise. You expected more challenge from him, heavier shadows. And”
― John le Carré, quote from The Night Manager
John le Carré
Born place: in Poole, Dorset, England, The United Kingdom
Born date October 19, 1931
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“What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.”
― Alain Badiou, quote from In Praise of Love
“During our lives all of us will experience opportunities for change which involve risk. These occasions may come at inconvenient times. We may not act upon them, but the challenge is there for us. The purpose of reincarnation is the exercise of free will. Without this ability, we would be impotent creatures indeed.”
― Michael Newton, quote from Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Life Between Lives
“The lack of women among the twelve disciples isn't prescriptive or a precedent for exclusion of women any more than the choice of twelve Jewish men excludes Gentile men from leadership.”
― Sarah Bessey, quote from Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible's View of Women
“…young people without arms and legs. They’re the ones who had the fortune or perhaps the misfortune to survive.”
― Zlata Filipović, quote from Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
“That's just a story."
"So are we--we're stories too," Russ says.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Boy21
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UndressedBookQuoters 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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