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ab36fe0
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He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man.
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John le Carré |
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b027dcf
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It's an old illness you suffer from, Mr. Smiley," she continued, taking a cigarette from the box; "and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated from the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims. But sometimes the division between your world and ours is incomplete; the files grow heads and arms and legs, and that's a terrible moment, isn't it? The names..
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John le Carré |
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601f932
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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.
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John le Carré |
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30e14ea
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We were wondering, you see,' he said in a faraway voice, 'whether you'd ever considered signing up with us on a more regular basis? People who have worked on the outside for us don't always fit well on the inside. But in your case, we think you might. We don't pay a lot, and careers tend to be interrupted. But we do feel it's an important job, as long as one cares about the end, and not too much about the means.
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John le Carré |
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3bf7a10
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Austerity pleased her--it gave her the comfort of sacrifice.
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John le Carré |
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700446e
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let us honour if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one. Or
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John le Carré |
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94b36da
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The ground on which you once stood is cut away. You have become a citizen of No Man's Land. I send you my greetings. -- the closing lines of Smiley's letter to Karla persuading him to defect.
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John le Carré |
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f0c0f24
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Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it's about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.
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John le Carré |
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18870aa
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He hated to be alone, but people bored him.
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John le Carré |
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55238d8
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But we progress, Your Graces. Inexorably we progress. Albeit at the blind man's speed, as we tap-tap along in the dark.
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John le Carré |
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91dee16
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They would know that inconsistency in human decision can make nonsense of the best-planned espionage approach; that cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a Departmental canteen.
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John le Carré |
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d4302d1
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Mendel hated motorists. Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.
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John le Carré |
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5e217ae
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Do you now have all the information you require?' 'No.' 'I envy you.
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John le Carré |
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4aecea9
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There was a fellow called Smiley married Ann Sercomb, Lord Sawley's cousin. Damned pretty girl, Ann was, and went and married this fellow. Some funny little beggar in the Civil Service with an OBE and a gold watch. Sawley was damned annoyed.
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John le Carré |
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843782e
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One more consideration also weighed with Smiley, though in his paper he is too gentlemanly to mention it. A lot of ghosts walked in those post-fall days, and one of them was a fear that, buried somewhere in the Circus, lay Bill Haydon's chosen successor: that Bill had brought him on, recruited and educated him against the very day when he himself, one way or another, would fade from the scene. Sam was originally a Haydon nominee. His later ..
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John le Carré |
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742811b
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right...What do you do for a living, Smiley?" "After the war I was at Oxford for a bit. Teaching and research. I'm in London now." "One of those clever coves, eh?"
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John le Carré |
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320e6c7
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Cyril, church warden and lead tenor in the choir, lives with mother, banned from unsupervised contact with schoolchildren; Harold, drunk dentist, early retirement, pretty thatched cottage off the Bodmin road, one son in rehab, wife in the bin.
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John le Carré |
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8c15c9f
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Some people are agents from birth, Monsignors -- he told them -- appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first, Your Eminences: 'Whether it's us, whether it's the opposition, or whether it's the bloody missionaries.
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history
harmonic-convergence
spies
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John le Carré |
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72e6a63
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Tell Max that it concerns the Sandman. Tell him I have two proofs and can bring them with me.
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John le Carré |
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68e9497
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Dresden: of all German cities, Smiley's favourite. He had loved its architecture, its odd jumble of medieval and classical buildings, sometimes reminiscent of Oxford, its cupolas, towers, and spires, its copper-green roofs shimmering under a hot sun.
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John le Carré |
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c79700f
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Her palm was broad and strong and dry. Its nakedness against his own was like the gift of her entire body.
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John le Carré |
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407e683
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Ashe was typical of that stratum 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.
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John le Carré |
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cf425a2
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That one won't crack, though, Mendel decided with approval; one of your flabby oak trees, Smiley was. Think you could blow him over with one puff, but when it comes to the storm he's the only one left standing at the end of it.
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John le Carré |
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8c24da4
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To Tabitha, these are facts of history. For those of us who endured them, they are a time of despair, bewilderment and frustration.
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John le Carré |
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6567f6f
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Shane was horrid to her, always sneering at her because she was honest and simple about the things she liked. Shane hated Stella--I think it was because Stella didn't want to be a lady of quality. She was quite happy to be herself. That's what really worried Shane. Shane likes people to compete so that she can make fools of them.
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John le Carré |
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b45fb9e
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Nobody can do corporate rot more discreetly than the spies. Nobody does better mission creep. Nobody knows better how to create an image of mysterious omniscience and hide behind it. Nobody does a better job of pretending to be a cut above a public that has no choice but to pay top price for second-rate intelligence whose lure lies in the gothic secrecy of its procurement, rather than its intrinsic worth.
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spying
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John le Carré |
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1b3ee10
|
All righ, 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 i..
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John le Carré |
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154d066
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You said they were friends, Mr Worthington. Sometimes third parties become intermediaries in these affairs.' On the word affair, he looked up and found himself staring directly into Peter Worthington's honest, abject eyes: and for a moment the two masks slipped simultaneously. Was Smiley observing? Or was he being observed?
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John le Carré |
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735d01b
|
Some fieldmen, and particularly the clever ones, take a perverse pride in not knowing the whole picture. Their art consists in the deft handling of loose ends, and stops there stubbornly.
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John le Carré |
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ef80938
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They had met at oxford; she had taken a better degree than Avery. But somehow marriage had made her childish; dependence had become an attitude, as if she had given him something irredeemable, and were always asking for it back. Her son was less her projection than her excuse; a wall against the world and not a channel to it.
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John le Carré |
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17498c5
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It was simpler in those days. We could say they'd died for their country. We didn't have to tell them the details; they didn't expect that.
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John le Carré |
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219ee32
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When the truth finally catches up to you, don't be a hero and run.
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truth
patient
calm
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John le Carré |
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ffae6f2
|
There is a kind of stupidity among the drunks, particularly when they are sober...
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John le Carré |
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cf271d6
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Some problems--take Ireland--were insoluble, but you would never get the Americans to admit anything was insoluble.
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John le Carré |
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0ca3548
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But hatred was really not an emotion which he could sustain for any length of time, unless it was the obverse side of love.
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John le Carré |
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68301f4
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Odd," he remarked finally. "One has no sense of shock. Why is that, Peter? You know me. Why is it?"
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John le Carré |
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75d03d5
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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."
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John le Carré |
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1ed0155
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He's going to save the world before he leaves it if it kills him.
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John le Carré |
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5fc1c37
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The Soviet Knight is dying inside his armour. He is a secondary power like you British. He can start a war but cannot continue one and cannot win one. Believe me.
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John le Carré |
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5f89c17
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Give these people a try, Smiley, they might have you and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company.
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John le Carré |
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811ba23
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all life has taught me to leave dangerous things unsaid.
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John le Carré |
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28f14c5
|
He was blown, his agents were hanged, and he entered the long middle age of the grounded pro. He did hackwork in London, sometimes for Smiley, ran a few home-based operations, including a network of girlfriends who were not, as the jargon has it, inter-conscious, and when Alleline's crowd took over he was shoved out to grass in Brixton--he supposed because he had the wrong connections, among them Smiley.
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John le Carré |
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de21674
|
These are true stories told from memory - to which you are entitled to ask, what is truth, and what is memory to a creative writer in what we may delicately call the evening of his life? To the lawyer, truth is facts unadorned. Whether such facts are ever findable is another matter. To the creative writer, fact is raw material, not his taskmaster but his instrument, and his job is to make it sing. Real truth lies, if anywhere, not in facts,..
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John le Carré |
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ccdd32a
|
Sometimes she thought Alec was right--you believed in things because you needed to; what you believed in had no value of its own, no function. What did he say: "A dog scratches where it itches. Different dogs itch in different places."
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John le Carré |