Those who are treated as pariahs become pariahs—just as, to quote Auden, those to whom evil is done do evil in return.
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...
They would expect him to be afraid; for his service pursued traitors as the eye of God followed Cain across the desert.
They were ashamed of having pencils and paper. But it’s no good just throwing them away, is it? That’s what I learnt in the end. That’s why I left the Party, I suppose. Smiley wanted to ask him how Fe...
They walked to her flat through the rain and they might have been anywhere—Berlin, London, any town where paving stones turn to lakes of light in the evening rain, and the traffic shuffles despondentl...
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 wer...
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 burea...
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 an...
There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.
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 becau...
The easiest and cheapest trick for any leader is to take his country to war on false pretenses.
The Armorys of this world don't steal. They serve their country right or wrong. Or they do until the day when they come face to face with real life and their warped rectitude deserts them and their fa...
Smiley himself was one of those solitaires who seem to have come into the world fully educated at the age of eighteen. Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are...
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...
Most of all he asked about their philosophy. To Leamas that was the most difficult question of all. ‘What do you mean, a philosophy?’ he replied. ‘We’re not Marxists, we’re nothing. Just people.’ ‘Are...
It was the most monotonous day of my life, he replied without a second’s hesitation. Then his rigid face broke and re-formed itself into the best smile ever, so that for a moment he really did look as...
It was from us they learnt the secret of life: that we grow old without growing wise. They realized that nothing happened when we grew up: no blinding light on the road to Damascus, no sudden feeling...
It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three.
It dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle-age without ever being young, and that he was, in the nicest possible way, on the shelf.
If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out. Oscar Wilde