The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

by John Le Carré

Fawley didn’t like Leamas, and if Leamas knew he didn’t care. Fawley was a man who belonged to Clubs and wore representative ties, pontificated on the skills of sportsmen, and assumed a service rank in office correspondence. He thought Leamas suspect, and Leamas thought him a fool.

All that’s left in the end is a kind of nausea; you never want to cause suffering again. Forgive me, but isn’t that rather what you felt when Karl Riemeck was shot? Not hate for Mundt, nor love for Karl, but a sickening jolt like a blow on a numb body

You’re a fanatic who doesn’t want to convert people, and that’s a dangerous thing.

Everywhere that air of conspiracy which generates among people who have been up since dawn—of superiority almost, derived from the common experience of having seen the night disappear and the morning come.

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.

“No, no; not physically. Physically it was a nightmare, but you see Mundt had a special interest in beating me up. Apart from the confession.” “Because you dreamed up that story about—” “Because I am a Jew.” “Oh Christ,” said Leamas softly.

“I wouldn’t have minded—I don’t think I would have minded, not so much anyway—if he had hurt me for myself, for hate or jealousy. Do you understand that? That long, long pain and all the time you say to yourself, ‘Either I shall faint or I shall grow to bear the pain, nature will see to that’ and the pain just increases like a violinist going up the E string. You think it can’t get any higher and it does—the pain’s like that, it rises and rises, and all that nature does is bring you on from note to note like a deaf child being taught to hear. And all the time he was whispering Jew . . . Jew. I could understand, I’m sure I could, if he had done it for the idea, for the Party, if you like, or if he had hated me. But it wasn’t that; he hated—”

Austerity pleased her—it gave her the comfort of sacrifice.

it was like mid-week evensong when she used to go to church—the same dutiful, little group of lost faces, and same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people.

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. What did he say: “A dog scratches where it itches. Different dogs itch in different places.”

truth existed outside people, it was demonstrated in history, individuals must bow to it, be crushed by it if necessary.

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

She was dead; her face was turned away, her black hair drawn across her cheek as if to protect her from the rain.

oh, God; oof