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But gossip must see its characters in black and white, equip them with sins and motives easily conveyed in the shorthand of conversation.
it dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle age without ever being young,
“I see.” (You’re dangerous, Maston. You’re weak and frightened. Anyone’s neck before yours, I know. You’re looking at me that way—measuring me for the rope.)
Have the inner mind in parenthesis
That was the kind of thing he understood, thought Smiley; goodness me, he really is rather contemptible. It was exciting to find Maston being as unpleasant as he expected.
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?
“They’ll ring back in an hour,” he said. “Come on. I’ll show you round the estate. Know anything about bees, do you?” “Well, a very little, yes. I got bitten with the natural history bug at Oxford.” He was going to tell Mendel how he had wrestled with Goethe’s metamorphoses of plants and animals in the hope of discovering, like Faust, “what sustains the world at its inmost point.” He
There was a trolley by the door with instruments on it, scissors, bandages, and bottles, strange objects that carried the terror of the unknown,
He fought a relentless battle against sleep, for when he closed his eyes they seemed to turn inwards on the chaos of his brain;
His mind was wonderfully lucid, ranging like Prometheus over his whole world; where had he heard that: “the mind becomes separated from the body, rules a paper kingdom…”?
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?”
said to him, oh I said to him a thousand times, ‘only make no laws, no fine theories, no judgements, and the people may love, but give them one theory, let them invent one slogan, and the game begins again.’
He was a man who thought and acted in absolute terms, without patience or compromise.
