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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
a3b86c3	Forgive me. Sometimes an answer can vary with a context, if you follow me			John le Carré
fb8df90	We pretend a lot of things aren't there. Or we pretend that other things are more important. That's how we survive.			John le Carré
9768206	Outside the school's walls the Swinging Sixties are in full cry, but inside them the band of Empire plays on. Twice-daily chapel services praise the school's war dead to the detriment of its living, value the white man above lesser breeds, and preach chastity to boys who can find sexual stimulation in a Times editorial.			John le Carré
54b7c56	Did I fuck her? No, I bloody well didn't. I made mute, frenzied love to her in pitch darkness for six life-altering hours, in an explosion of tension and lust between two bodies that had desired each other from birth and had only the night to live.			John le Carré
4c80738	And what's life if it isn't invention? Starting with inventing yourself.			John le Carré
ba2ebb8	Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat. Having himself no particular opinions or tastes he relied upon whatever conformed with those of his companion. He was as ready to drink tea at Fortnum's as beer at the Prospect of Whitby; he would listen to military music in St. J..		intrigue spying	John le Carré
e20d740	Dash it all, she's an actress! Don't take her so seriously. Actors don't have opinions, my dear chap, still less do actresses. They have moods. Fads. Poses. Twenty-four-hour passions. There's a lot wrong with the world, dammit. Actors are absolute suckers for dramatic solutions. For all I know, by the time you get her out there, she'll be Born Again!			John le Carré
6653990	Lo racconto in maniera semplice ma precisa, come un buon soldato rievoca una battaglia, non piu col sapore della vittoria o della sconfitta ma unicamente con l'emozione del ricordo.			John le Carré
7e478ba	He has a saying: he'll only believe what can be written on a postcard.			John le Carré
127cfe3	CIA Interrogator: Have you ever met any jazz musicians you would describe, or who would describe themselves, as anarchists? Bartholomew 'Barley' Scott Blair: Hmmm... ah, there was a trombone player, Wilfred Baker. Bartholomew 'Barley' Scott Blair: He's the only jazz musician I can think of who is completely devoid of anarchist tendencies.			John le Carré
4fa31c4	who's an ex-diplomat of all people to complain if the wrapping is prettier than what's inside?			John le Carré
14b9237	They might have you, and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company.		materialism	John le Carré
c08c699	Merridew might not have been the slenderest of men or the tallest. But he had grip, he had cunning and like many fat men he had unexpected resources of indignation which he was able to turn on like a flood when they were needed.			John le Carré
ec5f061	You'll just have to take our word for it.' 'Your Service's word?' 'For the time being, yes.' 'On the strength of what? Aren't you supposed to be the gentlemen who lie for the good of their country?' 'That's diplomats. We're not gentlemen.' 'So you lie to save your hides.' 'That's politicians. Different game entirely.			John le Carré
32f0f37	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
f9cdf49	I wished I could make them throw everything over for a flawed and impossible passion, only to see the objective it turn against them, proving there is no reward for love except the experience of loving and nothing to be learned by it except humility.			John le Carré
163732b	If a decade of diplomatic life had taught Toby one thing, it was to treat every crisis as normal and soluble.			John le Carré
fb722e4	Thus we do disagreeable things, but we are defensive. That, I think, is still fair. We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night. Is that too romantic? Of course, we occasionally do very wicked things"; he grinned like a schoolboy. "And in weighing up the moralities, we rather go in for dishonest comparisons; after all, you can't compare the ideals of one side with the methods ..			John le Carré
90790a6	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.		life order	John le Carré
f88fda8	He knew what it was then that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England: it was the caring about little things--the faith in ordinary life; the simplicity that made you break up a bit of bread into a paper bag, walk down to the beach, and throw it to the gulls. It was this respect for triviality which he had never been allowed to possess; whether it was bread for the seagulls or love,..			John le Carré
f8c840e	There was only now [ ... ] There was no tomorrow because tomorrow was the excuse. There was now or there was nowhere.			John le Carré
fa7cd39	This is a war," Leamas replied. "It's graphic and unpleasant because it's fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it's nothing, nothing at all besides other wars--the last or the next."			John le Carré
815858f	The novel's merit, then--or its offence, depending where you stood--was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible. The bad dream turned out to be one that a lot of people in the world were sharing, since it asked the same old question that we are asking ourselves fifty years later: How far can we go in the rightful defence of our Western values without abandoning them along the way? My fictional chief of the British Service--I cal..			John le Carré
665bee0	All right, Pendel had lied to him, if lying was the word. He had told Osnard what he wanted to hear and gone to extraordinary lengths to obtain it for him, including making it up. Some people lied because lying gave them a kick, made them feel braver or cleverer than all the lowly conformists who went on their bellies and told the truth. Not Pendel. Pendel lied to conform. To say the right things at all times, even if the right things were ..			John le Carré
6ac17a6	There are moments that are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.			John le Carré
5a7dae8	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..			John le Carré
f7fc05d	Everything in the world is true if you invent it hard enough and love the person it's for!			John le Carré
886ac53	Guns have their own silence. It is the silence of the dead to come.			John le Carré
934f63c	What that judge did is immoral. Here in Panama when we bribe somebody we expect loyalty.			John le Carré
4e5f6b0	Arthur Braithwaite, known to Louisa and the children as God. And all right, strictly speaking Braithwaite did not exist. Why should he? Not every god has to exist in order to do his job.			John le Carré
e5507af	The classified cat watches from the kitchen window.			John le Carré
a17929e	Afterwards Smiley always thought of that interview as a fan dance; a calculated progression of disclosures, each revealing different parts of a mysterious entity. Finally Steed-Asprey, who seemed to be Chairman, removed the last veil, and the truth stood before him in all its dazzling nakedness. He was being offered a post in what, for want of a better name, Steed-Asprey blushingly described as the Secret Service.		secret-service spy	John le Carré
817741b	Les mauvaises langues ont l'habitude de voir leurs cobayes tout en noir ou tout en blanc et de leur attribuer des defauts ou des mobiles que le style stenographique de la conversation peut aisement suggerer.			John le Carré
3d5292f	Il savait qu'un etre intelligent pouvait etre neutralise par la stupidite de ses superieurs, et des semaines d'un travail patient, acharne - vingt-quatre heures sur vingt-quatre - annihilees par ce genre de personnages. (chapitre 6)			John le Carré
5a2fc43	si les Americains s'etaient donne autant de mal pour le desarmement que pour envoyer un pauvre type sur la lune, ou coller des rayures roses dans le dentifrice, on l'aurait depuis longtemps, le desarmement. (...) le plus grand peche de l'Occident etait de croire qu'il pouvait foutre en l'air le systeme sovietique par une surenchere dans la course aux armements, parce que dans ce cas-la, on jouait avec le destin de l'humanite. Et qu'en metta..			John le Carré
6f27839	Smiley was not opposed to social distinctions but he liked to make his own.			John le Carré
d801e15	The tortured are a class apart. You can imagine - just - where they've been, but never what they've brought back.			John le Carré
5da2e0b	His secretive nature detested the purpose of all interviews, their oppressive intimacy, their inescapable reality.			John le Carré
0311b09	the striver in him knew that his first aim must be to rise in the system he dreamed of liberating.			John le Carré
9c81f57	By what route the infant Hansen found his way to the Jesuits, the file did not relate. Perhaps the mother converted. Those were dark years still, and if expediency required it, she may have swallowed her Protestant convictions to buy the boy a decent education. Give the Jesuits his soul, she may have reasoned, and they will give him a brain. Or perhaps she sensed in her son from early on the mercurial nature that later ruled his life, and s..		education jesuits	John le Carré
53cf4d1	It is not fashionable to quote Stalin but he said once, "half a million liquidated is a statistic, but one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy." He was laughing, you see, at the bourgeois sensitivities of the mass. He was a cynic. But what he meant is still true: a movement which protects itself against counter-revolution can hardly stop at the exploitation - or the elimination, Leamas - of a few individuals. It is all on..			John le Carré
d9e3773	His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were.			John le Carré
e953c31	Ashe, Kiever, Peters; that was a progression in quality, in authority, which to Leamas was axiomatic of the hierarchy of an intelligence network. It was also, he suspected, a progression in ideology. Ashe, the mercenary, Kiever the fellow traveler, and now Peters, for whom the end and the means were identical.		intelligence spy ideology	John le Carré
adfb99b	They had brought him in during the war, the professional civil servant from an orthodox department, a man to handle paper and integrate the brilliance of his staff with the cumbersome machine of bureaucracy. It comforted the Great to deal with a man they knew, a man who could reduce any colour to grey, who knew his masters and could walk among them. And he did it so well. They liked his diffidence when he apologized for the company he kept,..			John le Carré

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