Call for the Dead (George Smiley, #1)

by John Le Carré

But gossip must see its characters in black and white, equip them with sins and motives easily conveyed in the shorthand of conversation.

He learnt what it was never to sleep, never to relax, to feel at any time of day or night the restless beating of his own heart, to know the extremes of solitude and self-pity, the sudden unreasoning desire for a woman, for drink, for exercise, for any drug to take away the tension of his life.

But you need a different kind of fuel, don’t you, when you’re alone? You’ve got to hate, and it needs strength to hate all the time. And what you must love is so remote, so vague when you’re not part of it.”

“What games did you think you were playing, you two? Do you think you can flirt with power like theirs, give a little and not give all? Do you think that you can stop the dance—control the strength you give them? What dreams did you cherish, Mrs. Fennan, that had so little of the world in them?”

Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism. That was why he hated Dieter now, hated what he stood for more strongly than ever before: it was the fabulous impertinence of renouncing the individual in favour of the mass. When had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom?

Dieter cared nothing for human life: dreamed only of armies of faceless men bound by their lowest common denominators;