“The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“...in the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery...”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“Look... we're getting to be old men, and we've spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems. I can see through Eastern values just as you can see through our Western ones. Both of us, I am sure, have experienced ad nauseam the technical satisfactions of this wretched war. But now your own side is going to shoot you. Don't you think it's time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“Treason is very much a matter of habit, Smiley decided.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“We've had enough." He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. "We've had a bellyful, in fact."
"And like everyone who's had enough," said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, "he wants more.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function:”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“God is in his Heaven and the first night was a wow.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“The monstrosity of this, reaching Smiley through a thickening wall of spiritual exhaustion, left him momentarily speechless.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing," Ann liked to say--it was a favourite apologia, indeed, for many of her misdemeanours. "There is only one reason for doing something. And that's because you want to." Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“Look, we are getting to be old men, and we've spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems... Don't you think it's time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they're making a fantasy about themselves.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“And your wife, she's in the pink and so on?"
His expressions were also boyish.
"Very bonny, thank you," said Smiley, trying gallantly to respond in kind.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“Middle children weep longer than their brothers and sisters. Over her mother’s shoulder, stilling her pains and her injured pride, Jackie Lacon watched the party leave. First, two men she had not seen before: one tall, one short and dark. They drove off in a small green van. No one waved to them, she noticed, or even said goodbye. Next, her father left in his own car; lastly a blond, good-looking man and a short fat one in an enormous overcoat like a pony blanket made their way to a sports car parked under the beech trees. For a moment she really thought there must be something wrong with the fat one, he followed so slowly and so painfully. Then, seeing the handsome man hold the car door for him, he seemed to wake, and hurried forward with a lumpy skip. Unaccountably, this gesture upset her afresh. A storm of sorrow seized her and her mother could not console her.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“...what woman has ever stopped by a want of information? She felt. And despised him for not acting in accordance with her feelings.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things. What do you think of i?”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“Smiley was the oddest. You thought, to look at him, that he couldn't cross the road alone, but you might as well have offered protection to a hedgehog.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“Martindale had no valid claim on Smiley either professionally or socially. He worked on the fleshy side of the Foreign Office and his job consisted of lunching visiting dignitaries whom no one else would have entertained in his woodshed. He was a floating bachelor with a grey mane and that nimbleness which only fat men have.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“Lo raccontò in maniera semplice ma precisa, come un buon soldato rievoca una battaglia, non più col sapore della vittoria o della sconfitta ma unicamente con l'emozione del ricordo.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“He would set up as a mild eccentric, discursive, withdrawn, but possessing one or two lovable habits such as muttering to himself as he bumbled along pavements. Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“There are moments that are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“…what woman has ever stopped by a want of information? She felt. And despised him for not acting in accordance with her feelings.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
“He has a saying: he'll only believe what can be written on a postcard.”
― John le Carré, quote from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John le Carré
Born place: in Poole, Dorset, England, The United Kingdom
Born date October 19, 1931
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“Her mother, an unshapely, chubby-cheeked creature from the rural gentry of Styria, permanently lost her hair at the age of forty after being treated for influenza by her husband, and prematurely withdrew from society. She and her husband were able to live in the Gentzgasse thanks to her mother's fortune, which derived from the family estates in Styria and then devolved upon her. She provided for everything, since her husband earned nothing as a doctor. He was a socialite, what is known as a beau, who went to all the big Viennese balls during the carnival season and throughout his life was able to conceal his stupidity behind a pleasingly slim exterior. Throughout her life Auersberger's mother-in-law had a raw deal from her husband, but was content to accept her modest social station, not that of a member of the nobility, but one that was thoroughly petit bourgeois. Her son-in-law, as I suddenly recalled, sitting in the wing chair, made a point of hiding her wig from time to time--whenever the mood took him--both in the Gentzgasse and at the Maria Zaal in Styria, so that the poor woman was unable to leave the house. It used to amuse him, after he had hidden her wig, to drive his mother-in-law up the wall, as they say. Even when he was going on forty he used to hide her wigs--by that time she has provided herself with several--which was a symptom of his sickness and infantility. I often witnessed this game of hide-and-seek at Maria Zaal and in the Gentzgasse, and I honestly have to say that I was amused by it and did not feel in the least bit ashamed of myself. His mother-in-law would be forced to stay at home because her son-in-law had hidden her wigs, and this was especially likely to happen on public holidays. In the end he would throw the wig in her face. He needed his mother-in-law's humiliation, I reflected, sitting in the wing chair and observing him in the background of the music room, just as he needed the triumph that this diabolical behavior brought him.”
― Thomas Bernhard, quote from Woodcutters
“Where is everything?’ Kendall and I chorused.”
― Jacqueline Wilson, quote from Lola Rose
“How could you ever feel comfortable if no matter where you went you felt like you belonged someplace else?”
― Mark Peter Hughes, quote from Lemonade Mouth
“IT is an eternal phenomenon: the insatiate will can always, by means of an illusion spread over things, detain its creatures in life and compel them to live on. One is chained by the Socratic love of knowledge and the delusion of being able thereby to heal the eternal wound of existence; another is ensnared by art’s seductive veil of beauty fluttering before his eyes; still another by the metaphysical comfort that beneath the flux of phenomena eternal life flows on indestructibly: to say nothing of the more ordinary and almost more powerful illusions which the will has always at hand. These three planes of illusion are on the whole designed only for the more nobly formed natures, who in general feel profoundly the weight and burden of existence, and must be deluded by exquisite stimulants into forgetfulness of their sorrow.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from The Birth of Tragedy
“Man will desire oblivion rather than not desire at all.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from On the Genealogy of Morals
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