A Murder of Quality

by John Le Carré

I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.”

What a shame, thought Fielding, that a mind so perceptive of beauty had no talent for creation.

once in the war he had been described by his superiors as possessing the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin, which seemed to him not wholly unjust.

Smiley himself was one of those solitaries 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 not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country’s enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed.

A fact, once logically arrived at, should not be extended beyond its natural significance.

what is important is seldom urgent. Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant.”

he reflected for the hundredth time on the obscurity of motive in human action: there is no true thing on earth. There is no constant, no dependable point, not even in the purest logic or the most obscure mysticism; least of all in the motives of men when they are moved to act violently.

Brigadier Havelock, O.B.E., Chief Constable of Carne, sat like a water rat on a raft.