The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

by John Le Carré

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 despondently through wet streets.

Two other windows in the courtyard were lit. In one she could see the flickering blue shadow of a television screen, the figures round it held motionless in its spell; in the other a woman, quite young, was arranging curlers in her hair. Liz wanted to weep at the crabbed delusion of their dreams.

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.

He never drove again without some corner of his memory recalling the tousled children waving to him from the back of that car, and their father grasping the wheel like a farmer at the shafts of a hand plough.

‘Espionage is not a cricket game,’ Peters observed sourly and after that they sat in silence.

It must have rained in the night; the ground was moist, and the whole landscape so sharply defined against the white sky that Leamas could distinguish

even single trees on the furthest hills.

‘it is not fashionable to quote Stalin—but he said once “half a million liquidated is a statistic, and one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy.” He was laughing, you see, at the bourgeois sensitivities of the mass. He was a great cynic.

It was hush-hush, but I’ve been in on things all my life where you only know a little and someone else knows the rest.

It is said that Balzac on his deathbed enquired anxiously after the health and prosperity of characters he had created.

Only very rarely, as now, going to bed that evening, did he allow himself the dangerous luxury of admitting the great lie he lived.

Beneath them, half screened by the ghostly patchwork of tall pine trees, lay the meeting point of two great valleys. The steep wooded hills on either side gradually yielded their colours to the gathering dusk until they stood grey and lifeless in the twilight.

Sometimes she thought Alec was right—you believed in things because you needed to; what you believed in had no value of its own, no function.

‘We cannot build Communism without doing away with individualism. You cannot plan a great building if some swine builds his sty on your site.’

Do you know what Khrushchev said about the counter-revolution in Hungary?’ Liz shook her head. She must show interest, she must make the woman talk. ‘He said it would never have happened if a couple of writers had been shot in time.’

As he spoke Liz remembered the drab prison courtyard, and the wardress saying: ‘It is a prison for those who slow down the march . . . for those who think they have the right to err.’