The Honourable Schoolboy (George Smiley, #6; Karla Trilogy #2)

by John Le Carré

“He went to the bagno, he took the waters, and while doing so he met a lady whose name alone so impressed him that he made his wife use it from then on.”

They think of themselves in the middle, whereas, of course, really they’re nowhere.

“Behind every painter,” he liked to say, “and behind every fieldman, lads, there should be a colleague standing with a mallet, ready to hit him over the head when he has gone far enough.”

it is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.

the rain ended, and the night surrounded them like another country.

These people terrify me, but I am one of them. If they stab me in the back, then at least that is the judgment of my peers.