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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 19b6a29 | And what am I thinking? I am thinking that a man who cannot speak clearly cannot think clearly. | John le Carré | ||
| 6056959 | haunted by sad faces which moved through the rain like driftwood in a forgotten harbour. | John le Carré | ||
| 2f34993 | To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul. | John le Carré | ||
| 4de7319 | According to our anarchist writers, world conflict should lead to creative chaos. If such chaos is intelligently exploited, a free society will emerge. But when I looked about me, I was forced to accept that the preconditions of creative chaos did not exist, neither did the intelligent exploiters. Chaos presupposes a vacuum of power, yet bourgeois power was gaining everywhere, and so was the military might of America, for whom West Germany .. | John le Carré | ||
| 6206d86 | what is conviction? How do we identify it? How can we know that we should be guided by it? Is it to be found in the heart, or in the intellect? And what if it is only to be found in the one and not the other? | John le Carré | ||
| 1d0f154 | Put it this way, George," he suggested, when he had savoured the night air for a moment. "You traveling on business, or for pleasure in this thing? Which is it? Smiley's reply was also slow in coming, and as indirect: "I was never conscious of pleasure," he said. "Or perhaps I mean: of the distinction." | pleasure | John le Carré | |
| b697b71 | The row of villas which lines Western Avenue is like a row of pink graves in a field of grey; an architectural image of middle age. Their uniformity is the discipline of growing old, of dying without violence and living without success. They are houses which have got the better of their occupants, whom they change at will, and do not change themselves. Furniture vans glide respectfully among them like hearses, discreetly removing the dead a.. | John le Carré | ||
| 82d41cc | By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed. Then we have a war. This war. | John le Carré | ||
| b74d30f | The vertical man | John le Carré | ||
| 529f694 | changeful, occasionally wise and sympathetic. 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. Mendel | John le Carré | ||
| 846ac8a | It's my innocence," he explains. "Your what?" He reiterates, very precisely. "Our problem, Timbo, is my purblind, incurable, omnivorous innocence. I can't leave life alone. I love it. Its fictions and its facts. I love everybody, all the time. Best of all I love whoever I was speaking to last." "And the corollary to that?" "And the corollary to that is that you've got to be jolly careful what you ask of me. Because I'll do it. You're such a.. | John le Carré | ||
| a45ad8c | Siempre hay docenas de razones para no hacer nada --en realidad era una de las frases con que pretendia excusar muchos de sus actos censurables--, y solo hay una razon para hacer algo, y esta razon es la de querer hacerlo>>. | John le Carré | ||
| ac33a81 | it's a law. A man's got to pay for his own dreams. | John le Carré | ||
| 78b150d | Leninismo: la conveniencia de las alianzas transitorias. | John le Carré | ||
| df5b934 | Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love. John le Carre | Bey Deckard | ||
| 08bf811 | Germany's emergence as a self-confident, non-aggressive, democratic power - not to speak of the humanitarian example it has set - is a pill too bitter for many of us Brits to swallow. That is a sadness that I have regretted for far too long. | John le Carré | ||
| 9bf5c06 | Mas em diplomacia nada e duradouro, nada e absoluto e uma conspiracao entre assassinos nao e motivo para interromper o fluxo da conversa | John le Carré | ||
| ad0a52d | An undertaker contemplates his funeral, the rich man his destitution, the gaoler his imprisonment, the debauchee his impotence. An actor's greatest terror, I am told, is to watch the theatre empty itself while he wrestles in a void for his lines, and what else is that but a premature vision of his dying? For the civil servant, it is the moment when his protective walls of privilege collapse around him and he finds himself no safer than the .. | John le Carré | ||
| 49b4bce | Percebeu entao o que Liz lhe tinha dado, aquilo que teria de procurar readquirir se alguma vez regressasse a Inglaterra: era o interesse pelas pequenas coisas, a fe na vida comum, a simplicidade que fazia a pessoa esfarelar um pedaco de pao para dentro de uma saco de papel, ir ate a praia e da-lo as gaivotas. Era este respeito pelas coisas triviais que a ele nunca lhe fora permitido possuir; | triviality | John le Carré | |
| 481da59 | To be inhuman in defence of our humanity . . . harsh in defence of compassion. To be single-minded in defence of our disparity. | John le Carré | ||
| c714d7e | Por fuerza tiene que haber argumentos en contra. Siempre los hay. No hay nada grabado en piedra. No en el mundo real. | John le Carré | ||
| c5ece9f | and the wood smoke will roll out of the fireplace on to the carpet we paid too much for on that rainy afternoon in Interlaken in the snowless winter of whenever it was, | John le Carré | ||
| b7ec0be | He hated to be alone, but people bored him. Being alone was like being tired, but unable | John le Carré | ||
| 3fb6a5a | That's the trouble with Americans, isn't it, really? All that emphasis on the future. So dangerous. It makes them destructive of the present. | John le Carré | ||
| 2e9e408 | You just happened to put your hand to your face and find it damp and you wondered what the hell Christ bothered to die for, if He ever died at all. | John le Carré | ||
| 8bb39df | The cafe was the last in the street, if not in all Paris, to lack both a juke-box and neon lighting - and to remain open in August - though there were bagatelle tables that bumped and flashed from dawn till night. For the rest, there was the usual mid-morning hubbub, of grand politics, and horses, and whatever else Parisians talked; there was the usual trio of prostitutes murmuring among themselves, and a sullen young waiter in a soiled shi.. | John le Carré | ||
| 5447d4e | Probably she said yes. Afterwards she was not sure. She saw his scared gaze lift and stare at the approaching bus. She saw an indecision near to panic seize him, and it occurred to her - which in the long run was an act of near clairvoyance - that he proposed to push her under it. He didn't, but he did put his next question in Russian - and in the brutal accents of Moscow officialdom. | John le Carré | ||
| 49f5fa4 | 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 | ||
| ef56578 | But she did not say it, she kept rigidly silent. Ostrakova had already sworn to herself that she would restrain both her quick temper and her quick tongue, and she now physically enjoined herself to this vow by grabbing a piece of skin on the soft inside of her wrist and pinching it through her sleeve with a fierce, sustained pressure under the table, exactly as she had done a hundred times before, in the old days, when such questionings we.. | John le Carré | ||
| 8d46838 | Because he was good!' Smiley snapped, and there was a startled silence everywhere, while he recovered himself. 'Vladimir's father was an Estonian and a passionate Bolshevik, Oliver,' he resumed in a calmer voice. 'A professional man, a lawyer. Stalin rewarded his loyalty by murdering him in the purges. Vladimir was born Voldemar but he even changed his name to Vladimir out of allegiance to Moscow and the Revolution. He still wanted to belie.. | John le Carré | ||
| 13a0828 | Guillam was exhausted. 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. | John le Carré | ||
| b90fcf0 | What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. | John le Carré | ||
| b30ecad | E caminhando que aprendo o rumo do meu caminho | John le Carré | ||
| cd5e0fc | As they crossed the fifty yards which separated the two checkpoints, Leamas was dimly aware of the new fortifications on the Eastern side of the wall--dragons' teeth, observation towers, and double aprons of barbed wire. Things had brightened up. | John le Carré | ||
| 905fdad | he asked, in a more tentative tone, "What's the" | John le Carré | ||
| c4d5d95 | affectation of assuming everything was alive and potentially recalcitrant, | John le Carré | ||
| 546252d | Enemies I do not fear, Villem. But friends I fear greatly.'" Smiley" | John le Carré | ||
| 7366c71 | Why are Scots so attracted to the secret world? Smiley wondered, not for the first time in his career. Ships' engineers, Colonial administrators, spies. . . . Their heretical Scottish history drew them to distant churches, he decided. "George!" | John le Carré | ||
| e250610 | What's it got to do with you and the CIA whether I came here with a woman or a Muscovy duck? | John le Carré | ||
| 38dbc1a | It is said that men condemned to death are subject to sudden moments of elation; as if, like moths in the fire, their destruction were coincidental with attainment. Following directly upon his decision, Leamas was aware of a comparable sensation; relief, short-lived but consoling, sustained him for a time. It was followed by fear and hunger. | death spy | John le Carré | |
| 57bb870 | What follows is a truthful account, as best I am able to provide it, of my role in the British deception operation, codenamed Windfall, that was mounted against the East German Intelligence Service (Stasi) in the late nineteen fifties and early sixties, and resulted in the death of the best British secret agent I ever worked with, and of the innocent woman for whom he gave his life. | John le Carré | ||
| 2203635 | Smiley presented an odd figure to his fellow passengers - a little fat man, rather gloomy, suddenly smiling, ordering a drink. The young, fair-haired man beside him examined him closely out of the corner of his eye. He knew the type well - the tired executive out for a bit of fun. He found it rather disgusting. | John le Carré | ||
| ddd0713 | If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out. Oscar Wilde | John le Carré | ||
| c95f362 | since nothing is more predictable than the media's parroting of its own fictions and the terror of each competitor that it will be scooped by the others, whether or not the story is true, because | John le Carré |